The Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS) and Makerere University Business School (MUBS) have agreed to deepen collaboration in a renewed push to strengthen Uganda’s national quality culture, warning that the country’s export ambitions and industrial growth will stall unless quality and standards become central to education, enterprise development and public behaviour.
Speaking at a follow-up meeting held at the MUBS main campus, UNBS Executive Director Eng. James Kasigwa said the partnership is a key plank of the bureau’s five-year strategic plan, which prioritizes building a nationwide appreciation for quality and compliance.
“One of the initiatives over the next five years is to build the national quality culture where the population embraces quality and standards,” Kasigwa said.
“UNBS is in the business of growing quality enterprises. We shall ensure that students and all stakeholders appreciate the role of standards in economic transformation at individual, enterprise and national level,”he added.
Kasigwa stressed that UNBS is legally mandated under Section 3 of the UNBS Act to promote education on standardisation, a function the bureau intends to scale up through closer collaboration with academic institutions.
As part of this plan, UNBS will establish a National Standards and Quality Institute to lead teaching, training and research on standards.
The bureau is also preparing to introduce personnel certification programmes, which Kasigwa said will help improve the competence of Uganda’s workforce and strengthen the country’s competitiveness for investment and tourism.
He added that aligning graduates, enterprises and public institutions with required standards is essential if Uganda is to realize its ambitious ten-fold growth strategy, which relies on export expansion, import substitution and industrialization.
“This collaboration will help enterprises create awareness and build competences that will ensure that Ugandan products, including human resource, comply with the required quality and standards at national, regional and global level,” he said.
MUBS Principal, Prof. Moses Muhwezi, said the business school recognizes that the quality of graduates and the institutions that train them directly affects Uganda’s economic performance.
“As a government institution and a key player in the education sector, we are committed to assist government to achieve a ten-fold growth,” Prof. Muhwezi said.
“We are collaborating with UNBS and other government entities to ensure that we undertake standards in businesses, labour force, and our processes. We should be academically knowledgeable in the area of standardisation.”
He announced that MUBS will sponsor one staff member to pursue a PhD in standards to strengthen internal expertise and help embed quality principles across academic programmes.
The initiative comes as Uganda continues to grapple with persistent challenges of substandard goods, quality breaches in manufacturing, and weak adherence to standards among small and medium enterprises—factors that have historically undermined export competitiveness and consumer safety.
UNBS says it hopes that mainstreaming standards education in universities and business schools will create long-term behavioural change, reduce compliance gaps and ultimately support national economic transformation.