On 5th May 2025, the First Lady and Minister of Education and Sports Janet Katana Museveni issued a note of advice to over 300 students who graduated in science, technology, and law disciplines at King Caesor University (KCU), urging them to embrace AI and Technology not as trends, but as tools.
The First Lady’s message called for graduates everywhere to dream fearlessly and transform obstacles into progress while ensuring Uganda thrives in this digital age by marrying innovation with ethics.
Over time, the government has made a deliberate call to institutions and students to tailor their education to solving society's problems, with President Museveni championing a call for prioritizing sciences so that the country can address its challenges in production, value addition, improving the pathogenic economy, through the manufacture of medicines and vaccines.
Indeed, the President’s message has always been that whereas arts are equally important when you do fall sick, it is unlikely that you will turn to Shakespeare, you will need a doctor for treatment.
“You of Shakespeare and literature, if we sack you from here (Uganda), you may not get another job, but an engineer or doctor can be employed in Kenya. What Shakespeare said can not construct a building”.
President Museveni says that we need scientists more urgently than “ Historians like myself”. Science and technology are what societies have relied on for the last 5 million years, and we should stalk a flame from wherever an effort to uphold and prioritize science is coming from.
I was fortunately at the KCU graduation and took a moment to tour the university and interact with the students, 80 percent of whom come from humble beginnings, many orphans, and several unable to support themselves through school, let alone university.
However, to ensure that these have access to education, not just any education but science and technology, is not only commendable but exemplary, and these are the very people to which the message from the First Lady will most sink.
This is because they have lived through the problems that come with lack, and most of them can be best addressed through scientifically motivated societal solutions.
The Ministry of Education and Sports champions education rooted in academic rigor and visionary grit and I hope the students at KCU heed to First Lady’s message so that they will emphasize the importance of scientific research that benefits the country at large, invest more in groundbreaking innovations, that is how China developed Coatem for Malaria.
The writer is the Online Editor for State House Uganda