Uganda's drive to close the digital divide in secondary education has reached a major milestone, with the partnership between the Research and Education Network for Uganda (RENU) and the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) now connecting more than 200 schools nationwide to high-speed internet. The collaboration, which traces back to an agreement signed in January 2025 to extend connectivity to 85 additional secondary schools under the Uganda Communications Universal Service and Access Fund (UCUSAF), built on earlier phases that had already linked 144 schools to RENU's network between 2019 and 2023. RENU has since described the ongoing collaboration with UCC as having enabled the connection of over 200 schools to reliable connectivity over the past few years, calling it a partnership model that demonstrates a clear path for expanding digital equity in Uganda's education and research sectors. The initiative continues to respond to the demands of Uganda's competence-based secondary curriculum, which requires schools to embed ICT into teaching while reducing dependence on teacher-led instruction in favour of student-centred, resource-driven learning.
The scale of RENU's broader network has grown substantially over the past year and a half. In June 2025, RENU connected Ishongororo Health Centre IV in Ibanda District, marking the 1,000th campus connected to the RENU network overall, a figure spanning universities, research centres, other tertiary institutions, schools, and health facilities across the country. RENU's infrastructure now supports over 250,000 university students nationwide, enabling access to e-learning platforms, virtual classrooms, academic databases, and global collaboration tools both on campus and in remote, underserved communities. On the connectivity side, specifically for students, eduroam usage has surged: in 2024 alone, more than 81,000 unique users logged into eduroam over 57 million times, reflecting how deeply the free, secure Wi-Fi roaming service has embedded itself in daily school life, well beyond the numbers recorded when the RENU-UCC schools programme first launched.
Schools connected under the partnership continue to report tangible academic gains. Lira Town College, one of the earliest beneficiaries, has credited its RENU connection with turning around performance in national examinations and giving both students and staff dependable access to research and e-learning tools. The RENU Zero-rated Mobile Access service and Metro eduroam, which allow students and teachers to reach school platforms without consuming data bundles even off-campus, have kept participation in virtual learning strong in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic first drove their uptake. Digital inclusion has also advanced, with the Busega Community School for the Deaf and Blind among the standout beneficiaries, using stable internet to run online education programmes including American Sign Language instruction.
RENU's momentum has not only been in schools in the past year. In January 2026, the organisation marked its 20th anniversary alongside upgrading its network backbone to 200 Gbps, a major leap in capacity designed to support the growing demand across its member institutions. In February 2026, RENU partnered with Makerere University to commission a national AI research cloud to support the AI Innovation Academy through the Pathogen Economy Lab within Makere University. RENU also launched a Leadership Academy and free access to premium academic journals for Ugandan researchers, signalling a shift from pure connectivity provision toward a broader digital ecosystem role. RENU has also continued to invest in the technical capacity of school ICT staff, running regional workshops such as one held for Eastern Uganda schools, to train ICT heads in network configuration, cybersecurity, and server administration.
Looking ahead, RENU and UCC say the partnership will keep expanding, as officials acknowledge that the schools connected so far still represent a fraction of those across Uganda lacking reliable internet. With the national curriculum increasingly reliant on digital literacy and the government's broader Digital Transformation Roadmap gathering pace, the RENU-UCC collaboration is positioned as a template for how public-private partnerships can extend Uganda's digital backbone into classrooms that would otherwise be left behind, bridging the rural-urban education divide one school and one signal at a time.
