Uganda Needs More Than a Money Economy

For years, Uganda’s economic conversation has revolved around one familiar ambition: moving from a subsistence economy into a money economy. That transformation is important. But perhaps Uganda now needs to ask a more difficult question: what comes after the money economy?
That question deserves attention following Makerere University’s inaugural conference on the Theory of Noonomy, held on August 20, where scholars, policymakers, international partners and students explored whether knowledge, human intelligence and innovation could provide a different pathway to sustainable economic transformation. Noonomy may sound unfamiliar to many Ugandans. That is precisely why the conversation matters.

The theory places knowledge and human potential at the centre of production, challenging us to think beyond an economy whose success is measured mainly by how much we produce, sell and consume; and toward one measured by what we know, create and solve.
At the Makerere conference, Professor Robert Wamala argued that Africa should not simply import the concept, but interrogate and Africanise it by asking what a knowledge and intelligence driven economy would actually mean in the African context. This is where Uganda’s conversation should begin.


We have young people, universities, researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and an increasingly connected population. Yet having these resources is not enough. The real question is whether our institutions are organised to turn human ability into lasting national value. A young Ugandan who develops an idea in a university laboratory should not have to spend years searching for the infrastructure, financing or institutional support needed to turn that idea into something useful.
A researcher should not only be celebrated after producing a paper. Their research should have a pathway towards influencing policy, creating businesses, improving public services or solving problems within communities. And a university should not only be viewed as a place where young people obtain degrees; it should also be one of the places where Uganda’s next industries, technologies, policies and
solutions are imagined.
This is why the Noonomy conversation deserves to move beyond academic conferences. Makerere’s conference identified several practical gaps that could hinder a knowledge driven transformation, including reliable electricity, roads, digital infrastructure, education, healthcare, research and innovation. These are not small details. They are the foundations upon which an intelligence driven
economy must stand.
It is difficult to talk about artificial intelligence and advanced technologies when many citizens still struggle with reliable connectivity, and difficult to demand innovation from young people when research institutions lack sufficient resources to experiment. It is equally difficult to speak of a knowledge economy when education remains heavily focused on passing examinations rather than developing the ability to solve problems. This does not mean Uganda should abandon the pursuit of a money economy. Rather, we should recognise that money should be a means of development, not the final definition of development.

The next stage of Uganda’s transformation should therefore be about what Ugandans can know, create, invent and solve. That requires universities to become more than degree producing institutions. It requires stronger links between universities, industry and government, and it requires research to be funded not merely as an academic requirement but as an investment in the country’s future. Most importantly, it requires Uganda to trust its own people.
The proposed establishment of a Noonomy Centre at Makerere’s School of Economics could provide an opportunity for the University to lead this conversation in Africa; the centre would reportedly serve as a hub for continental dialogue, research and innovation. But its success will ultimately depend on what happens beyond the conference room.


Uganda does not simply need more theories. It needs theories that can be tested, adapted and transformed into solutions. The question before us, therefore, is not whether Noonomy will replace the money economy. It is whether Uganda is prepared to build an economy in which knowledge itself becomes one of our most valuable national resources.
Perhaps that is the economic conversation we should be having next.

Kampala’s HIV Crisis Is Also a Communication Crisis

211 new infections a week should force us to rethink how we communicate HIV prevention in the age of social media.

Kampala recorded an average of 211 newly identified HIV infections every week between July

2025 and June 2026, according to a Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) study that reviewed testing data from 649,570 people across health facilities in the city. That translates to about 30 cases a day and 11,241 over the 12-month period.

Numbers of that magnitude should stop a city in its tracks. Yet there is a danger that they will pass through our newsfeeds like most statistics do: noticed briefly, discussed for a moment and then buried beneath the next trending story.

That is the communication problem we should be discussing.

The findings were presented at the 2026 Kampala HIV/TB Stakeholders’ Meeting, where Dr Douglas Tuhumwire, KCCA’s Care and Treatment Lead, said the rise was suspected to be associated with factors including unregulated sexual activity in massage parlours, spas and lodges, domestic violence, structural inequalities and digital or social media influenced exposure. He also made clear that these factors require further investigation before they can be confirmed as the causes of the increase.

The demographic picture makes the findings even more concerning. Women accounted for 64

per cent of those tested and 62 per cent of the new positive cases. Although people aged 20 to 24 made up the largest share of those tested, new positive cases were concentrated among people aged 30 to 39. This is therefore not simply a story about young people being careless. It is a warning that HIV prevention needs to reach people throughout their adult lives.

Josephine Kaleebi, Executive Director of Reach Out Mbuya Community Health Initiative, highlighted another uncomfortable reality: some adolescents who were protected from mother- to-child transmission at birth are now acquiring HIV as they grow older. Her concern points to a gap between surviving childhood with access to treatment and carrying forward the knowledge and behaviours necessary to remain protected in adulthood.

This is where Kampala’s HIV problem becomes a communication problem.

We live in a city where a rumour, joke or 30 second video can reach thousands of people within hours. Yet a public health finding that translates to roughly 30 newly identified HIV infections every day struggles to command the same attention.

Why?

The answer is not that Ugandans do not have access to information. It is that important information does not always compete effectively for public attention.

Health communication has to operate in the same environment as entertainment, politics, advertising and influencers. It must compete with content deliberately designed to keep people scrolling.

That does not mean turning HIV prevention into entertainment. It means understanding how people consume information today and communicating health messages in ways that are credible, relevant, understandable and difficult to ignore.

For journalists, this creates an important responsibility. Covering the release of HIV statistics once is not enough. Journalism should help audiences understand what the numbers mean, who is affected, what remains uncertain and what people can do with the information.

For health institutions, the challenge is equally significant. A press statement is not a communication strategy. Prevention requires sustained communication across the platforms where people actually spend their time.

Kampala’s health system has also demonstrated that progress is possible. The KCCA study found that 88 per cent of people knew their HIV status, 78 per cent of those diagnosed were enrolled on antiretroviral therapy, and 97.5 per cent of people on treatment had achieved viral suppression. The city has therefore made substantial gains in treatment and care, even as new infections remain a concern.

That contrast matters.

Uganda does not simply have a treatment problem. It has a prevention and communication challenge.

New prevention tools are also emerging. Uganda has authorised lenacapavir, a twice yearly

injectable HIV prevention drug hailed as a major breakthrough, and was named among the first countries in sub Saharan Africa expected to receive early access through a Global Fund agreement with the drug’s manufacturer, Gilead Sciences. Ugandan trial sites were also part of the international research that demonstrated the drug’s effectiveness. As with any new tool still

being rolled out nationally, its impact will depend on how well the public understands it and how quickly it reaches the people who need it most.

The tools are therefore expanding.

What must expand with them is our ability to communicate their importance.

Kampala does not lack information about HIV. It needs a communication culture that treats prevention with the urgency it deserves.

The question for journalists, health professionals, policymakers and everyone with a digital platform is simple: if information can travel faster than ever before, why aren’t the messages that can protect lives travelling just as fast?

The 11,241 figure should not simply become another headline that disappears tomorrow.

It should become a reason to rethink how we communicate, who we reach, where we reach them and whether our message is actually being heard.

Why Universities Will Determine Uganda’s Tenfold Growth by 2040

 “A nation grows when its universities produce solutions, not just graduates.”

Uganda wants to grow its economy from about US$50 billion to US$500 billion by 2040. It is one of the country’s most ambitious targets since independence. Government has laid out the path through the Fourth National Development Plan (NDP IV): industrialization, value addition, innovation, export growth and a more productive population.

But behind every factory, every innovation, every new technology and every good policy is one resource that cannot be imported or borrowed human knowledge.

That is why the success or failure of Uganda’s Tenfold Growth Strategy will depend heavily on an institution that gets far less attention than roads, electricity or investment incentives: the university.

Universities do far more than award degrees. They train the scientists who improve agriculture, the engineers who design industries, the doctors who strengthen public health, the lawyers who shape policy, the teachers who raise the next generation, and the entrepreneurs who create jobs. If Uganda is serious about transforming its economy, strengthening its universities is not optional. It is a national necessity.

This is not a new lesson. Uganda’s own history shows that national development has always moved alongside the growth of higher education.

Uganda’s universities have always grown with the country.

Uganda’s journey in higher education began in 1922, when Makerere opened as a small technical school with just fourteen students learning carpentry, mechanics and building. Within a few years it had expanded into medicine, agriculture, veterinary science and teacher training, before growing into one of Africa’s most respected universities.

That growth did not stop at Makerere, and it did not stop there in time either. For decades after independence, Uganda had only a handful of institutions offering degree level education, and university education itself remained something only a small number of Ugandans ever experienced. By the late 1980s, the country still had just one public university. That changed quickly from the 1990s onward, as government allowed private and religious institutions to open and be accredited. By the early 2000s, the number of universities had grown past ten. Today, Uganda has more than forty chartered and accredited universities, public and private, spread across the country.

Those numbers tell a bigger story than statistics alone. They show a country that has moved from treating        higher education as a privilege reserved for the few, to treating it as something every region and every community should have access to. That shift matters, because it means more Ugandans than ever now have a real chance to be part of the “knowledge economy” the Tenfold Growth Strategy talks about. But numbers alone are not enough growing the number of universities only helps the country if the quality of what they teach and research keeps growing too.

That transformation mirrors Uganda’s own journey from colonial administration, through years of political instability, to today’s ambition of becoming an upper middle income economy. As the country’s priorities changed, its universities changed too, moving from producing artisans to training the researchers, innovators, policymakers and professionals whose work increasingly shapes national development.

Education and development have therefore grown together. One cannot be fully understood without the other. This importance is also reflected in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. SDG 4 calls for inclusive, quality education, because education is the foundation everything else is built on.  Better education leads to stronger health systems, higher productivity, more innovation and more competitive economies.

That link becomes even clearer when SDG 4 is read alongside SDG 8, which promotes decent work and economic growth, and SDG 9, which focuses on industry, innovation and infrastructure. Together, these goals point to a simple truth: a country cannot industrialize without first investing in the people who will do the industrializing. Uganda’s Tenfold Growth Strategy rests on exactly the same idea.

Structure is easy to describe. The spirit is harder and more important

It is easy to list what the Tenfold Growth Strategy wants: exports up, savings up, a bigger formal economy, more manufacturing. Those are the numbers. But the real spirit behind the plan is a refusal to keep doing things the same way and hoping for a different result. Uganda’s planners are not asking for slightly better performance they are asking the country to fundamentally change how it produces, how it trains people, and how it uses what it already has. That kind of change cannot be bought or built overnight. It has to be learned. And that is exactly the job of a university not just to hand out degrees, but to build the thinking, the skills and the research habits that make a different kind of economy possible in the first place.

Makerere University’s Strategic Plan (2025–2030) offers a practical example of what this looks like in action. Rather than focusing only on teaching, the university has placed research, innovation, partnerships and societal transformation at the center of its mission.

Through the Makerere Research and Innovations Fund (Mak-RIF), researchers are developing solutions in agriculture, engineering, health, environmental conservation and digital technology. At the Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI), scientists continue to strengthen Africa’s ability to respond to public health emergencies through research, disease surveillance and innovation.

These initiatives show what universities can achieve when research is treated not as an academic exercise, but as a driver of economic and social change.

What the exchange programmes actually bring home

International partnerships matter too. Makerere’s exchange agreements with the University of Padova and the University of Perugia in Italy have opened the door for students and staff to study, teach and research abroad and for Italian researchers to work alongside Ugandan ones here. Under the Padova partnership alone, Ugandan students in fields like statistics and environmental science have spent semesters training at a university with far deeper research funding and more advanced labs than most of what is available locally. Some of that collaboration has already produced joint research, including recent work studying how invasive plant species are affecting local ecosystems.

The real value is not the trip abroad itself. It is what comes back. Students return with new technical skills, exposure to different ways of solving problems, and connections to researchers and institutions they can keep working with long after the exchange ends. Lecturers who take part often bring back updated ways of teaching or new areas of research to introduce at home.  Multiply that across every department running an exchange, and it becomes a steady, quiet way of upgrading what Makerere and by extension Uganda is capable of, without government having to fund all of it alone. A contradiction Uganda still needs to fix.

Yet Uganda faces an uncomfortable contradiction. While it expects universities to produce evidence based solutions, leadership positions in some public institutions are still handed to people without the relevant professional background.

When technical decisions are made by people without technical knowledge, research struggles to influence policy. Universities can generate all the solutions in the world, but those solutions cannot change society if the people in charge are not equipped to use them.

If Uganda genuinely wants a knowledge driven economy, competence; not convenience or connections must increasingly decide who gets appointed to technical and leadership positions. That does not mean every leader needs a PhD.  It means the people making decisions about health, agriculture, industry or education should actually understand those fields, or be required to build that understanding once appointed.

Uganda’s journey towards a $500 billion economy will not be won through infrastructure projects alone. Roads can connect markets and electricity can power industries, but only educated people create the ideas that transform economies.

Every country that has successfully industrialized invested heavily in universities, research and innovation long before it became an economic giant. Uganda already has that foundation a history stretching back over a century, and a university system that has grown from one institution to more than forty. What remains is to strengthen it: through sustained investment, stronger partnerships, relevant skills training, and real support for research.

Universities should therefore be seen not simply as centers of learning, but as national development institutions. If Uganda is serious about achieving tenfold growth by 2040, its universities cannot stand on the sidelines. They must stand at the very center of the country’s development agenda producing knowledge, shaping policy, driving innovation, and preparing the people who will build Uganda’s future. Because in the end, nations do not become prosperous by chance. They become prosperous by educating the people who create that prosperity.

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