At 64, Uganda’s next independence is in its classrooms

Uganda,  9 October 2026 – As Uganda marked 64 years of independence, a different conversation about the country’s educational future was taking place at Hisense’s headquarters in Kampala. Away from the traditional celebrations, school leaders, representatives of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) institutions, and private sector stakeholders gathered for a co-creation workshop to address pressing educational bottlenecks. Their focus was on developing a Bioeconomy Skills Compact for Education and Agricultural Transformation in Uganda, an initiative aimed at bringing education and industry closer together to rethink how young people are prepared for a rapidly changing economy. With agriculture increasingly shaped by technology, innovation and digitalisation, the participation of private sector partners, including Hisense, underscored the importance of connecting classroom learning with the skills, technologies and opportunities of new emerging markets.

The gathering reflected the seriousness of the task ahead, with Hisense proprietor Ms. Liu Mingshu making a rare appearance to welcome participants and deliver opening remarks. The Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM)’s Manager for Skilling and Engagement for Community Development, Prof. Anthony Egeru, challenged participants to reflect on their individual and collective responsibilities in shaping Uganda’s educational future. His message was both timely and thought-provoking, “The next stage of freedom will be won or lost in the classroom.”

                                                                                Hisense proprietor Ms. Liu Mingshu

He went on to hold participants’ attention with a presentation titled, Education, Transitions and Youth Employment in Uganda, drawing attention to the urgent need to translate the country’s educational gains into meaningful economic opportunities for its growing youth population.

“Uganda has achieved remarkable gains in getting children into school since 1962. The task for the next 14 Independence Days, up to the 78th anniversary in 2040, is to turn those learners into the skilled workers and entrepreneurs a US$500 billion economy will need,” he remarked.

“Uganda is not short of young people. It is short of skilled, job-ready young people,” he emphasised. “Secondary schools are where that can change fastest.”

Sixty-four years of getting children into school

The expansion of schooling is one of the clearest achievements of Uganda’s independence era. Primary enrolment has grown from about 2.5 million before Universal Primary Education in 1997 to 11.4 million today. Secondary enrolment has risen from under 180,000 in 1986 to 2.1 million, helped by Universal Secondary Education from 2007.

The country now has nearly 80,000 schools and institutions, 55 universities and degree-awarding institutions, and 14,000 science and mathematics teachers in public secondary schools, up from about 2,000 in 1986, according to the Ministry of Education and Sports. About 60% of pupils now move from P7 to S1, compared with fewer than 15% in the early 1980s.

The unfinished business: learning and jobs

Access has not yet become learning. The World Bank estimates that a child born in Uganda today will reach only 39% of their potential productivity as an adult, against a global average of 56%. About 83% of ten-year-olds cannot read a simple text, and children who spend about seven years in school learn the equivalent of about four.

Prof. Egeru’s analysis of the 2025 national examinations shows how quickly learners drop out. For every 100 children of school age, about 54 sat the Primary Leaving Examination, 29 sat S4 and only 11 sat S6. Fewer than three graduate from university each year. In 2025, 807,313 pupils sat PLE, 429,949 sat UCE and 165,172 sat UACE.

The labour market cannot absorb those who leave. About 700,000 young people reach working age every year, but only about 200,000 find jobs. The Uganda Bureau of Statistics reports that 50.9% of youth aged 18 to 30 are not in employment, education or training. Youth unemployment stands at 17.9%, nearly nine in ten non-farm jobs are informal, and four in ten adults work only in subsistence farming.

Where each school exit leads

The analysis links each point at which young people leave school to a different labour-market problem:

• Leaving at or before primary, which about seven in ten children do, feeds subsistence farming and poor livelihoods.
• Leaving after S4 leads mostly to part-time, low-paid informal work such as petty trade and boda-boda riding.
• A-level and university leavers face the highest open unemployment. Among young people with training beyond primary, 28.2% are unemployed, rising to 36.3% for young women.

“Rates are highest at the top, but numbers are biggest at the bottom,” Prof. Egeru said. By his estimate, about 87% of unemployed young people left school at or before secondary level. The common root, he argued, is weak early learning and too few practical, marketable skills at every level.

Fourteen Independence Days to a US$500 billion economy

Government’s Tenfold Growth Strategy aims to expand the economy to US$500 billion by 2040, driven by agro-industrialisation, tourism, minerals and science, technology and innovation. When Ugandans mark the 78th anniversary in 2040, that would mean an upper-middle-income country of about 70 million people earning around US$7,100 each.

From about US$69 billion this financial year, the target requires growth of about 15% a year in dollar terms, roughly 12% after inflation, for 14 consecutive years. At today’s 6.4% growth, the economy would reach only about US$250 billion by 2040.

Prof. Egeru’s modelling suggests that most of the extra growth must come from higher productivity, as workers learn and adopt new technology. That requires a very different workforce. Technicians and professionals make up about one in ten Ugandan workers today, against about one in three in economies like Malaysia and China. Uganda would need about 306,000 new technicians and 212,000 new professionals every year, against roughly 40,000 TVET completers and 40,000 university graduates now.

“About half of the people who will be working in 2040 are under 15 today,” he said. “They are in your classrooms now.”

Lessons from countries that made the leap

The countries Uganda hopes to emulate built schooling first. When South Korea was as poor as Uganda is today, in the late 1970s, about two in three of its teenagers were already in secondary school; in Uganda today it is roughly three in ten. China made nine years of schooling compulsory in 1986, about 15 years before its income passed US$1,000 per person.

Each country also tied its skills system to the industries it wanted. Korea built vocational high schools for its heavy industries and founded the science university KAIST in 1971. Singapore designed its technical institutes with employers. Malaysia funded training through a levy on companies.

Closer to home, Kenya now trains about 825,000 people in technical and vocational institutions, roughly eight times Uganda’s 103,000, with a similar population. Rwanda has introduced 12 years of basic education and a national push for vocational training.

On the World Bank’s Human Capital Index, Uganda scores 0.39 against 0.55 for Kenya, 0.80 for South Korea and 0.88 for Singapore.

The bioeconomy: the nearest opportunity

Prof. Egeru identified the bioeconomy, which turns crops, livestock, fish, forests and biological knowledge into food, medicines, materials, energy and services, as the fastest route to jobs for young people.

He estimates Uganda’s bioeconomy at about US$23 billion today, roughly a third of the economy and mostly primary farming. In a scenario aligned with the Tenfold strategy, it could grow to about US$115 billion by 2040. Most of that growth would come from processing and newer fields: bio-fertilisers and improved seed, herbal medicines and nutraceuticals, bio-packaging, biogas and digital agricultural services.

Coffee shows what is possible. Exports reached a record US$2.2 billion in 2024/25, almost double the year before, according to the Uganda Coffee Development Authority.

The modelling suggests off-farm bioeconomy jobs could rise from about 1.6 million to 4.6 million by 2040, about 215,000 new jobs a year, while the farms that remain become about three times more productive. Most of these jobs require secondary-school science followed by a certificate or diploma.

A call to school leaders

Prof. Egeru urged Heads of Schools not to wait for a new policy. He asked them to turn school farms, nurseries and composting sites into living laboratories for the competence-based curriculum; to test reading and mathematics at S1 entry and help those who are behind; to protect practical science lessons; to present vocational training as a first choice rather than a fallback; and to keep girls in science, noting that girls made up only 43.7% of A-level candidates in 2025.

For government, he called for a national early-grade reading and numeracy programme, a fully staffed secondary school in every sub-county, a doubling of vocational training intake by 2030 under the TVET Act 2025, and a national bioeconomy strategy linked to agro-industrialisation.

“Our parents won political independence in 1962,” he said. “The generation in school today must win economic independence by 2040. Each of the next 14 Independence Days should be measured by what our children can do, not only by how many are enrolled.”

                                                     Participants toured Hisense’s museum 

The workshop was convened by STEM Schools Industry Partnership (SISP) Uganda in collaboration with Uganda Martyrs University (UMU), RUFORUM, Ecoca and Hisense. It aimed to support Uganda’s competency-based education reforms while contributing to broader national and regional development priorities, including the Fourth National Development Plan (NDP IV) focus on agro-industrialisation, the Ten-Fold Growth Strategy, the EAC Regional Bioeconomy Strategy 2021/22–2031/32, and Uganda’s emerging National Bioeconomy Policy, currently being developed with support from EASTECO. With the national policy still under development, the workshop presented a timely opportunity for stakeholders to contribute practical recommendations that could inform its formulation.

Figures marked as estimates come from Prof. Egeru’s own modelling, presented alongside the keynote.