Museveni: "Skilling is the solution to youth unemployment"

President Museveni has said technical and vocational education and training is the solution to the issue of youth unemployment in the country.

Museveni’s remarks were delivered by Justine Kasule Lumumba, the minister of General Duties as Uganda Business and Technical examinations (UBTEB) marked 10 years of monumental strides since inception in 2011.

In order to tap into the regional and continental market, the president said the country must first address the issue of quality, adding that the aim should be to produce good quality and efficient products for the international market.

"I encourage Ugandans to go for training in vocational education and also mobilise others who are still negative about it to also send their children to get productive skills regardless of your level of education and status. This is a generation and era of skills," he said.

The president commended UBTEB upon reaching this important milestone and its contribution to the education sector through skills assessment, noting that when NRM came to power there has been increased access to education at all levels.

He said the introduction of Universal Primary Education (UPE) and Universal Secondary Education resulted in high enrolment rates at both primary and secondary levels, this he said accounts for the adult literacy rate in Uganda from 43% in 1986 to 76.5% today.

He noted that the people of Uganda are better educated today however despite the increase in the number of people who can read and write, the country is still grappling with the skills gap.

"The skills gap was a deliberate creation of the colonial education system which we inherited as a country. It seemingly designs to produce clerks and administrators to support the colonial government. This type of education creates people who only want white collar jobs with no skills to enable them to produce goods and services for the market either as employers or as workers," he said.

The executive secretary at UBTEB, Onesmus Oyesigye said over the years, they continued to stick to the core values of integrity, professionalism and this has enabled the country to successfully conduct all examinations series without any examinations’ leakages.

"We have built stronger synergies with the industry and other prospective employers to make sure that they get involved in the assessment of TVET candidates. This has over the years guaranteed the quality of our graduates," he said.