Uganda’s universities could soon be out of the teacher-training business entirely. According to a Ministry of Education and Sports spokesperson, Dr. Dennis Mugimba, the government is moving to strip public and private universities of their role in training teachers and hand that mandate over to a single dedicated institution: the Uganda National Institute for Teacher Education (UNITE).
The move, reported by the Daily Monitor on September 22, is being framed as a fix for what officials call inconsistent teacher-training standards across universities — different institutions teaching different methodologies, producing graduates who enter classrooms with uneven preparation. Centralising training under one institute, the thinking goes, should mean every new teacher comes out the other end trained the same way, to the same standard.
This isn’t actually new — it’s a 2019 plan finally catching up
If this sounds sudden, it isn’t. The policy basis for this goes back to the National Teacher Policy of 2019, which first recommended establishing a dedicated national institute to take over teacher education from universities and the old Grade III/V teacher colleges. UNITE itself was formally created by decree in July 2024, with a mandate to “coordinate and provide all levels of teacher education, ranging from initial teacher training to postgraduate training,” headquartered in Kira Municipality with regional campuses around the country.
The rollout, though, has been rocky. UNITE was originally supposed to open its doors in August 2024. It didn’t. Ministry sources have pointed to unresolved internal issues and council disagreements holding things up, and teacher colleges that used to feed into Kyambogo University stopped admitting new students back in 2019 once government raised the minimum teaching qualification to degree level — leaving a training gap that’s now years deep. The National Council for Higher Education has since cleared seven of UNITE’s nine proposed programmes, spanning nursery, primary, secondary and postgraduate education tracks.
Why it matters for students right now
For campus communities, this isn’t an abstract policy shift. Bachelor of Science with Education remains one of the most heavily subscribed courses in the country — it topped this year’s Higher Education Students’ Loan Scheme beneficiary list with 581 recipients alone, more than any other course. Thousands of students are currently enrolled in education degrees at Makerere, Kyambogo and other universities across the country, which raises the obvious question: what happens to students already in the pipeline if universities stop training teachers?
That detail isn’t yet clear from what’s been made public, and the full Monitor report sits behind a paywall, so CampusBee doesn’t yet have the ministry’s word on transition timelines, or whether currently enrolled education students will be grandfathered through to graduation under their university’s programme. Given how long UNITE’s own launch has already slipped, a hard, immediate cutoff for universities seems unlikely — but nothing official has been said about a timeline.
There’s also the bigger backdrop: the World Bank projects Uganda will need 48,000 additional primary school teachers by 2040. Every year UNITE spends unopened is a year that shortage keeps growing, which is likely part of why the ministry is pushing to formalise this shift now.
What we’re watching
CampusBee will follow up as more details emerge on how this affects students currently pursuing education degrees, when UNITE will actually be fully operational, and whether universities will be allowed to complete teaching out current cohorts. If you’re in an education programme and have information on how your university is responding to this, get in touch.
