Building Uganda’s tech talent: Dr Zawedde highlights opportunities and challenges

Last week, the permanent secretary of the ministry of Information and Communications Technology, Dr Aminah Zawedde, emphasized the need to equip Ugandans with the necessary skills and knowledge to thrive in the technology sector.

Speaking at the Uganda Developers Summit at Nakawa recently, Dr Zawedde highlighted the summit’s goal of catalyzing a dynamic tech community that propels Uganda’s tech industry forward, drives innovation, and fosters a culture of collaboration and growth.

“As a country, we have many young people, with over 30 million Ugandans below the age of 30 years. We graduate over 50,000 graduates out of university every year, and there are opportunities in the information and technology space, and there are jobs that people can do online in and out of the country,” she said.

The 2024 Uganda National Bureau of Statistics (Ubos) census data indicates that Uganda is a young country, with children aged zero to 17 years constituting 50.5 per cent (23.1 million) of the total population, while youth aged 18–30 years are 22.7 per cent (10.4 million).

Dr Zawedde noted that the summit played a crucial role in developing talent that can be employed to work online.

“In the IT era, people want to take as many services online as they can. If you are starting a business and you can’t deliver products to customers’ homes, then that business is likely to fail. If you have a company where you don’t allow people to partly work from home, you will not be able to thrive as an institution,” she explained.

She highlighted that the ministry of ICT is making deliberate efforts to equip young people with the skills needed to thrive in the tech industry.

“This summit brought together people to develop applications online, similar to practices in India, where developers create systems for global companies like Google. Uganda has that potential because we have young, educated individuals who speak good English,” she noted.

According to the Google software developer survey for 2021, Africa has about 761,000 software developers, with only 13,000 estimated to be in Uganda. Despite being one of the fastest-growing digitally enabled countries, less than 10% of these are developers.

Zawedde pointed out that Uganda, though landlocked, is strategically positioned to support software development across South Sudan, Kenya, Rwanda and the entire continent. The summit attracted over 500 participants, including software developers and companies seeking to hire 300 developers, demonstrating the ministry’s commitment to capacity building.

Addressing data safety, Michael Niyitegeka, the executive director of Refactory Academy, stressed the importance of continuous enhancement of capacity and infrastructure to maintain security.

“There is no software that is completely waterproof. You must continuously enhance your capacity and infrastructure to stay secure. When building software, you must implement mechanisms to safeguard against data breaches,” he explained.