Government plans regional skilling hubs to tackle 12% unemployment rate

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:06]According to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, the report from the labor market survey 2025 report shows that unemployment rate among the youth stands at 16.2% with males at 13.9% and females standing at 19%. The national unemployment rate stands at 12.2%.

[00:00:25]Only 57.6% of the people make up the working age population. To help solve the job mismatch, the Ministry of Public Service together with other ministries including the gender ministry and education system are teaming up to create a synergy that can be used to find solutions to the problem. Authorities from various ministries say that job skilling hubs in various regions were created without considering citizens' need to create enterprises aimed at overcoming poverty.

[00:00:53]We are doing a lot of skilling programs, but the skilling programs don't match with the industrial demand. They don't match with the day-to-day demand. Like the demands, what are the demands? The demands are factory in Kakira would probably need an electrician and an engineer, a civil engineer, to construct with an electrician. There are many efforts, but scattered, that government has put in place the scatter.

[00:01:19]And this approach has led to some mismatches between uh for instance, the people who want jobs and the people who employ them and the kind of skills they need.

[00:01:34]That has been a big disadvantage.

[00:01:37]Officials from the Ministry of Education and Sports, however, said that to overcome the unemployment threat in the country, the education system needs to be revised so that skilling is incorporated together with acquiring knowledge. Most of our children spend all the time in class and in school, but they are at workplaces.

[00:01:58]Therefore, they accumulate a lot of knowledge and less skills and competence. So, even when they finish school and that's the general education, they are supposed to have the knowledge and they have the knowledge. But the knowledge is not doing.

[00:02:13]It is too theoretical, it is too academic, and it is not work related.

[00:02:18]So, that's the challenge of the system.

[00:02:20]That people have the qualifications, but they are employed in wrong fields. If you go in our banks, if you go anywhere, you'll find their graduates of education, bachelor of education. They are working as bank tellers. So, they have the knowledge, they have the papers, but they are not doing what they studied. That's horizontal mismatch. We have vertical mismatch. Now, this vertical mismatch is why you have our PhDs, a person knows very many things that on things that don't are not needed.

[00:02:51]So, you have no many things or too too little of something, yet production and work related is a value chain.

[00:02:59]Then there is the quality mismatch, where people say I have a diploma, I have a degree, I have a certificate. But they have no competence. They note that clear guidelines need to be put in place when releasing skilled employees to match with the vacant fields. To put this in action, the National Planning Authority says every year jobs are created according to the plans by government, which needs to be followed when releasing skilled employees. We are now going to act in a concert.

[00:03:28]Uh if you are a university producing doctors, then you just don't overproduce.

[00:03:34]Or you produce so many doctors, there are very few hospitals here, they will not get employment anywhere.

[00:03:40]So, now you are given a quota.

[00:03:43]And you say we can predict that in the next maybe four, five years we shall need so many doctors in the country. And when they come out, we are sure they are going to find employment. As an example, everybody has a vacation.

[00:03:56]You will see somebody is saying I am a priest, but they cannot also do plumbing.

[00:04:01]Because from the word go, when they were studying, you must have something you're interested in and you are exposed to it alongside getting knowledge. Our education is not designed that way.

[00:04:13]So, in this NDP 4, which was released a year ago, uh we'll have a clear jobs target and we expect to create about 840,000 new jobs.

[00:04:27]And most of these jobs are targeted for these young population. As a planning authority, we guide the training institutions on areas where a country as a country will have abundant supply of human resources.

[00:04:42]And that is aimed at regulating the enrollments in different programs so that we do not waste resources uh training people that we already have in large numbers. So, we produce estimates of human resource supply in the country and indicate to them areas where you have surplus labor and areas where you have scarcity of labor.

[00:05:07]Despite creating these jobs, many say the process of acquiring the job is the most difficult with officials saying a criteria needs to be followed when hiring new workers. So, working with the Minister of Public Service, what they call workforce planning and succession planning, we understand the composition of the public service staffing.

[00:05:33]So, we know the different age groups and we know the retirement uh the retirement rate of our public servants. That uh forms part of the workforce planning methodology, which we have as planning authority and forms the estimation of the human resource requirement for the current labor market but also for the future.

[00:05:56]They explain why it is very hard to follow the job criteria planned by the government. Our mandate is basically to plan for the country and we do not implement.

[00:06:08]And I know from the implementers perspective the main challenges that have constrained them from generating the planned jobs is basically the inadequacy of the financial resources.

[00:06:22]Resources are never enough.

[00:06:23]Priorities are always so many. So once you have so many priorities, you end up re-prioritizing and failing to achieve the targeted number of jobs. Maria Jacinta Kanyange, NTV.