Prof. Charles Kwesiga delivered a keynote that put Uganda’s skills crisis in plain numbers — and the gap between where the country is and where it needs to be is stark.
Kyambogo University held its second annual Day of Vocational Studies on Wednesday, bringing together academics, industry leaders, and students under the theme “Deepening Competence-Based Education and Training in Uganda Through Vocational Skills Professional Development.”
The event, hosted by the School of Vocational Studies, was part celebration and part national conversation — an acknowledgment that Uganda’s economic transformation cannot happen without a serious reckoning with how the country trains its workforce.
The Deputy Vice Chancellor for Finance, Justus Kwetegyeka, represented Vice Chancellor Prof. Eli Katunguka at the ceremony.
The keynote address was delivered by Prof. Charles Kwesiga, Executive Director of the Uganda Industrial Research Institute (UIRI), and it opened with a number that should be uncomfortable for anyone working in education policy.
Uganda’s current ratio of engineers to technicians is approximately 1 engineer to 0.5–0.8 technicians.
The International Labour Organisation’s recommended ratio for a functional engineering and industrial workforce is 1 professional to 5 technicians to 25 craftsmen.
Uganda is not just falling short of that ideal. It has inverted it. The country is producing relatively more engineers — the top of the technical pyramid — while the middle and base layers of technicians and craftsmen, who do the actual hands-on work of building, maintaining, and operating industrial systems, are critically underpopulated.
“This critical shortage of middle-level technical manpower is prominent across several key sectors,” Prof. Kwesiga noted.
The implication is significant. You cannot run a factory, a construction site, a food processing plant, or a hospital equipment maintenance unit on engineers alone. The workforce that makes those institutions function is trained in vocational and technical programmes — precisely the kind of education that has historically been undervalued, underfunded, and undersupported in Uganda’s academic hierarchy.
Dr. Peter Rukundo, Dean of Students for Vocational Studies at Kyambogo, set the context for the day’s significance in his opening remarks. The School of Vocational Studies runs four departments — Finance, Life and Consumer Studies; Nutritional Sciences; Hotel and Institutional Catering; and Cosmetology and Fashion — each producing graduates whose skills have direct, measurable economic application.
The Day of Vocational Studies was established to do several things at once: profile the school’s academic programmes and research activities, exhibit the skill sets and products the departments actually produce, disseminate knowledge that advances vocational education development, and build the collaborations and partnerships that give vocational graduates a pathway into the formal economy.
In its second year, the event is establishing itself as a genuine platform — not just a campus showcase, but a space where the gap between university training and industry need gets examined openly.
The Kyambogo-UIRI Partnership
Prof. Kwesiga’s keynote was not purely analytical. He also pointed to what collaboration between academia and industry looks like in practice — and Kyambogo is already part of that story.
The relationship between Kyambogo University and UIRI goes back years. In April 2023, Prof. Kwesiga was invited by Vice Chancellor Katunguka to deliver a public lecture on strengthening academia-industry linkages. Since then, Kyambogo students have been regularly sent to UIRI’s facilities at Namanve Industrial Park for hands-on training — and their contribution to the growth of Uganda’s industrial skills base has been noted at the institute.
It is the kind of partnership that vocational education advocates have been calling for at a national scale: universities not just teaching theory within their walls, but embedding students in actual industrial environments where they develop the practical knowledge that classroom instruction alone cannot provide.
Prof. Kwesiga made this explicit in his keynote, emphasising that project-based learning is essential for the new competence-based curriculum, and that vocational skilling is fundamentally about job creation — which requires a relentless emphasis on practical knowledge over theoretical certification.
Uganda has 46 million people, 75% of whom are under 30. That demographic reality is either an asset or a liability depending entirely on whether those young people have skills that the economy can deploy.
The Day of Vocational Studies at Kyambogo is a small but pointed reminder that the answer to Uganda’s employment crisis does not lie exclusively in producing more university graduates with paper qualifications. It lies in producing more people who can fix machinery, prepare food at scale, design garments for export, manage hospitality operations, and apply nutritional science in communities that need it.
Kyambogo’s School of Vocational Studies is building those people. The second commemoration of this day is a signal that the institution intends to make that work more visible — and to demand that it receives the respect and investment it deserves.
