The 10th National Conference on Communications is coming to Makerere in June, and students can get involved
If you are studying anything in the technology, engineering, or communications space at a Ugandan university, the next few months are worth paying attention to.
The Uganda Communications Commission officially launched the 10th edition of the National Conference on Communications — NCC 2026 — on April 16 at the UCC Conference Hall in Kampala, kicking off what has become one of the most significant gatherings in Uganda’s ICT calendar.
The conference itself runs from June 24 to 26, 2026, and this year it is being hosted by Makerere University’s College of Engineering, Design, Art and Technology — CEDAT — which has now hosted the event five times, making it practically the conference’s home ground.
The National Conference on Communications is not just another government event where officials give speeches and everyone goes home. It is a working conference — one that features peer-reviewed research presentations, policy panels, startup showcases, and school-level innovation competitions. Real work gets presented, real partnerships get formed, and real careers get launched from rooms like these.
This year’s theme is “Accelerating market-driven innovation for Uganda’s development” — and if that sounds like a mouthful, the idea behind it is actually straightforward. UCC wants innovation that solves actual problems, not innovation that sits in a research paper and gathers dust.
UCC Executive Director Nyombi Thembo put it plainly at the launch: the goal is for ideas generated at the conference to be “tested against industry realities, refined through collaboration, and positioned for scale.” He also made a point that should resonate with any student tired of being told Uganda is only a consumer of technology — “Uganda should not merely be a consumer of technology, but a producer of solutions tailored to our development needs.
CEDAT’s Deputy Principal, Associate Professor Kizito Maria Kasule, was present at the launch and acknowledged the weight of hosting the conference for a fifth time. He tied the event to the National Development Plan IV, emphasising that researchers and innovators need to stay anchored to national priorities — not just global trends.
For CEDAT students especially, having this conference land on your campus is an opportunity that does not come around every year at every institution. The 2025 edition was hosted by Gulu University in partnership with ISBAT University — a pairing that Nyombi Thembo commended as a sign of growing collaboration beyond Kampala.
Here is the part most students will miss if they are not paying attention. A masterclass for prospective authors started on April 15 at the new CEDAT building, facilitated by Dr. Dativa Tizikara and Dr. Swaib K. Kawaase. The sessions are specifically designed to help participants develop and submit high-quality research papers for the conference.
If you have research work sitting in a folder somewhere — a final year project, a dissertation chapter, an idea you have been developing — this is the kind of support structure that can turn it into something that gets presented in front of an audience that actually matters
Uganda’s ICT sector has grown significantly over the past decade, but the gap between what is researched in universities and what actually gets built, funded, and deployed remains wide. Events like the NCC exist precisely to narrow that gap — to put students and researchers in the same room as industry players and policymakers who can take an idea from a slide deck to something that ships.
The 10th edition feels like a milestone worth showing up for.
