By Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi
Recently, a vocational institute in Uganda entered a memorandum of understanding with China’s Hunan Mechanical and Electrical Polytechnic (HMEP). I was delighted to learn that Uganda’s Luyanzi Institute of Technology (LIT), a vocational school in Kampala, is opening channels of opportunities to enhance training and employment opportunities for its students and teachers by enabling them access training programs, dual diploma programs, information exchange, materials and lectures, and joint research with such an advanced Chinese institute.
Vocational education in Uganda is highly stigmatised, to our detriment. It is referred to as “eby’emikono” in Luganda – a kind of downgrade of educational attainment from intellectual development to hand-skills, akin to our primate cousins which primarily survive on nimbleness of limbs.
For a country grappling with high youth unemployment rates, it is mistaken to overlook the potential of vocational education to skill our young people. It is the more urgent that we are a developing country with an acute need for skilled labourers to support our industrialisation. Our unbuilt and degraded infrastructure requires the skills of millions of skilled workers to build and maintain. A lot of government revenue is lost whenever we hire international firms to build our roads, airports, bridges and buildings.
One of the world’s most respected manufacturing countries, Germany, is proudly a vocational education giant. About 50% of German school leavers join vocational training to acquire advanced technical skills. Historically, few children went to college and yet the country was always an industrial powerhouse because it highly valued vocational training.
Uganda passed the Business, Technical and Vocational Training (BTVET) Act in 2008 to comprehensively cover the country’s vocational education needs. However, we have delivered short on implementation. I recently visited the Uganda Technical College Kichwamba. It is one of the most modernly built, well-equipped institutions I have seen in the country. Unfortunately, the institute can be seen on any day to be sparsely distributed with students. A cursory poll I conducted showed that some districts have no single student at the institute, while majority have one or two. This is a gross misuse of the huge investment in this school.
We should expand the size and number of vocational schools and have a compulsory education policy similar to UPE and USE, and also incentivise vocational training for example by assuring students ready jobs in government projects upon graduation.
China is the world’s second-biggest economy and fasted developing country. It has the world’s largest vocational education system with 9,752 secondary vocational schools and over 17.8 million students as reported by its Ministry of Education in 2023.
The NRM government’s historical mission to Uganda has often been stated to be the social-economic transformation of the country. To achieve this, government should align the economic and social development goals of the country with vocational education. China realised this early and adjusted the structure of its vocational schools to keep pace with new developments in supply chains, markets, technologies and consumption patterns. Currently, over 1,300 disciplines and 120,000 programs are offered by its vocational education institutions covering all areas of the national economy. For instance, over 70% of new frontline workers in advanced manufacturing, emerging industries and the IT-powered service sector are graduates of vocational schools.
The stigmatisation of vocational education can also be dealt a death blow if government established a direct link between vocational schools with formal academic institutions to make vocational training mainstream. In China, thousands of vocational institutes support hundreds of thousands of primary and secondary schools by offering courses on labour practices and professional skills. The country also examines both academic knowledge and vocational skills. This simultaneous blend of vocational and academic education contributes greatly to the individual development, economic growth and social progress of China.
Uganda should also collaborate with China on vocational education under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China cooperates with many countries and international organisations in vocational education with over 400 vocational colleges receiving tens of thousands of international students. Our country should use the opportunity of friendship with China to exchange students to learn and replicate China’s successful vocational education practices.
The Chinese goods filling up shelves in shops across Uganda are designed and manufactured by graduates from China’s vocational schools who are skilled in manufacturing machinery and electronics. Although China generally shares the negative stereotypes associated with vocational training in Uganda, it resembles Germany in enrolment with almost 50% of Chinese students attending vocational schools.
Many people accuse the Ugandan government of dictatorship. If the state has an ounce of repression in its institutional muscle, I wish it could use it to enforce compulsory enrolment in vocational schools to equip Ugandan children with employable skills to support our country’s development agendas. This is the sure way to delegitimise and eradicate opposition – haha.
The author is a senior research fellow at the Development Watch Centre.
