Prof. Barnabas Nawangwe didn’t come to the College of Computing and Information Sciences (CoCIS) to exchange pleasantries. He came with a challenge — and a warning.
During a high-level management meeting with CoCIS staff, Makerere’s Vice Chancellor made his position clear: the college is under-utilising its capacity to train doctoral researchers, and that needs to change — fast.
“As far as I’m concerned, in CoCIS, you are so well-staffed, you have the capacity to double the number of PhDs you are currently admitting. I hope you are not throwing out people claiming you don’t have capacity,” Prof. Nawangwe told staff.
The Numbers Behind the Push
The VC’s challenge is grounded in hard arithmetic. Makerere currently has 1,200 staff members holding PhD qualifications. If each supervised just two doctoral students, the university would have 2,400 PhD students in training at any one time. Current enrolment sits between 600 and 800 — meaning the university is running at roughly a third of its theoretical capacity.
To drive output, Makerere is shifting to a reward-based model — departments that successfully scale doctoral production while maintaining academic quality will be recognised and incentivised. The university is also moving to a cohort-based PhD admission system with two intakes per year, backed by a new Research Information Management System (RIMS) that tracks student progress in real time.
Why This Matters Beyond Makerere
Prof. Nawangwe’s push for more PhDs is not an internal institutional matter — it sits inside a much bigger continental story.
Africa currently produces just 3% of global knowledge. In 2020, the World Bank set a target for the continent to produce one million PhDs within a decade. That target remains far from being met. Meanwhile, China now outproduces the United States in annual PhD output — and the VC linked that directly to China’s rapid economic rise.
“We don’t want our children to go out there to be slaves again. Let them go there when they have skills and lead the world,” Prof. Nawangwe told staff, framing doctoral training as a question of generational responsibility and continental dignity.
Makerere’s researchers already bring in over $250 million annually through research grants, making the university one of Uganda’s largest foreign exchange earners. The VC’s argument is simple: scale the research, scale the impact.
CoCIS: A Record Year, But Room to Grow
CoCIS Principal Prof. Tonny Oyana acknowledged the momentum. By 2026, the college had produced a cumulative total of 66 PhD graduates, including a record 13 in 2026 alone — the highest annual output in the college’s history. The college runs 17 graduate programmes across two schools and has built a diverse faculty trained across India, America, Europe, and Africa.
Since 2018, the college’s Research Innovation Skills Enhancement (RISE) Fund has disbursed seed grants totalling approximately UGX 870 million, including a natural language processing project that attracted $200,000 in external funding.
But Prof. Oyana was candid about the structural challenges. A significant portion of graduate students are self-sponsored and juggling full-time employment with intensive research demands — a combination that slows completion rates and strains supervisors.
Staff raised concerns about workload too, with some academic staff simultaneously supervising up to nine PhD and 15 Master’s students while teaching and writing grant applications. Dr. John Ngubiri called for better incentives for supervisors, arguing that folding supervision into a flat salary is unsustainable under the new targets.
From Research to Revenue: The Innovation Agenda
The meeting wasn’t only about PhD numbers. Several university directorates laid out complementary reforms touching on research quality, commercialisation, and publishing.
Dr. Cyprian Misinde, Director of Quality Assurance, urged staff to publish exclusively in indexed, high-impact journals, warning that publications in obscure outlets simply don’t register on global ranking systems. Makerere University Press, represented by Assoc. Prof. William Tayeebwa, announced it now has the capacity to provide technical support for journal indexing — including Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) — and is actively working to revive journals that have gone dormant.
Dr. Margaret Nagwovuma from Makerere University Technology Innovation Centre (MUTIC) reminded staff that research should not end on library shelves. MUTIC currently has 15 projects in active commercialisation, and the university’s IP policy is structured to protect inventors while enabling their work to reach the market. Prof. Nawangwe illustrated the vision bluntly: he wants “millionaire professors” whose wealth comes from patents and royalties.
Members also called for a formal university AI-use policy, cautioning that without clear institutional guidance, artificial intelligence would remain a problem for students and staff rather than a tool.
The Takeaway
For students and staff at CoCIS, the message from the VC’s visit is unambiguous. Makerere is repositioning itself as a research-led institution, and computing sits at the centre of that ambition. The college has the staff, the infrastructure, and the funding ecosystems. What leadership is now demanding is the will to scale.
The continent is watching — and according to Prof. Nawangwe, Makerere has no excuse not to lead
