Addressing Education, Inequality and Unemployment in Uganda
Uganda: Addressing the Education, Inequality and unemployment
Over the last 20 years, several people have lamented about the fact that Uganda's education system produces job seekers instead of job makers. Knowing exactly how many Ugandan graduates remain unemployed is a tall order because of the difficulty in getting reliable employment or for that matter unemployment figures.
An often quoted statistics claims that every year tertiary institutions in Uganda produce 400,000 graduates out of whom only 80,000 or 20 per cent get meaningful employment and the rest either remain unemployed or underemployed. Using this scenario as a proxy, the graduate unemployment rate in Uganda is therefore put at 80 percent. That is very high.
The foregoing calculation does not however factor in the foreign students who study from Ugandan colleges as well as Ugandan students who study from foreign colleges. The cumulative number of unemployed graduates is even more worrying because the available job opportunities are chased by both fresh and old graduates alike.
If we take the 80 per cent unemployment rate as reliable, where then is the cause of the unemployment problem? Is the problem resulting from a faulty or education system or is it arising from somewhere else?
The job market is subject to forces of supply and demand. The education system is responsible for supplying the people with the required knowledge and skills that employers need. Now in the case of Uganda it appears that the education system is in fact too efficient and is supplying more potential workers than the market can absorb.
Who then is responsible for supplying jobs or creating demand for knowledgeable and skilled workers? In many economies jobs are provided by government and the private sector. In Uganda government jobs have been shrinking over the past 20 years.
Retrenchment in the civil service coupled with a long freeze on hiring new civil servants has significantly contributed to the shrinking of the
Over the last 20 years, several people have lamented about the fact that Uganda's education system produces job seekers instead of job makers. Knowing exactly how many Ugandan graduates remain unemployed is a tall order because of the difficulty in getting reliable employment or for that matter unemployment figures.
An often quoted statistics claims that every year tertiary institutions in Uganda produce 400,000 graduates out of whom only 80,000 or 20 per cent get meaningful employment and the rest either remain unemployed or underemployed. Using this scenario as a proxy, the graduate unemployment rate in Uganda is therefore put at 80 percent. That is very high.
The foregoing calculation does not however factor in the foreign students who study from Ugandan colleges as well as Ugandan students who study from foreign colleges. The cumulative number of unemployed graduates is even more worrying because the available job opportunities are chased by both fresh and old graduates alike.
If we take the 80 per cent unemployment rate as reliable, where then is the cause of the unemployment problem? Is the problem resulting from a faulty or education system or is it arising from somewhere else?
The job market is subject to forces of supply and demand. The education system is responsible for supplying the people with the required knowledge and skills that employers need. Now in the case of Uganda it appears that the education system is in fact too efficient and is supplying more potential workers than the market can absorb.
Who then is responsible for supplying jobs or creating demand for knowledgeable and skilled workers? In many economies jobs are provided by government and the private sector. In Uganda government jobs have been shrinking over the past 20 years.
Retrenchment in the civil service coupled with a long freeze on hiring new civil servants has significantly contributed to the shrinking of the