Uganda: Catholic Church to Empower Youths on ICT
By Henry Neondo
KAMPALA---Uganda’s Catholic Church has set up plans to heighten training of youths in information and communication technology with the aim of assisting them exploit government’s plan to outsource jobs in ICT sector.
Last week, Uganda government revealed of its plans to outsource over 100,000 government jobs in the ICT sector in an ambitious outsourcing plan to provide employment for the youth.
According to the ICT Ministry, the initiative code-named Business Process Outsourcing seeks to recruit young graduates to not only take charge of the front office outsourcing jobs but also do internal business functions such as human resource, research and accounting.
To help the youths, the Kolping Society, an NGO affiliated to the Catholic Church has moved on plans to train about 80 youths with hands on skills in mobile phone, computer repairs and maintenance and motorcycle repair.
Already, the plan has seen an initial 39 youths graduate with skills in mobile phone, computer maintenance and repair.
Birungi K. Desiderius, the technical services co-ordinator of the Kolping Society said: “these are skills that are on high demand and the youths are ready to tap into the government’s outsourcing plan.”
Outsourcing is the process through which one company hands over part of its work to another company, making it responsible for the design and implementation of the business process under strict guidelines regarding requirements and specifications from the outsourcing company.
Uganda has a large pool of educated but unemployed or underemployed graduates.
Currently, universities and tertiary institutions in Uganda offload between 8,000 to 10,000 graduates into the job market annually but only a small percentage of these find gainful employment.
Meanwhile, InterGlobal Services (IGS), a U.S. call centre operator in conjunction with the Busoga Kingdom are in the final stages of setting up a 150-seater world-class call centre in Jinja, 80 kilometres east of Kampala.
The call centre will employ 450 operators, working 3 shifts every day, and 7 days a week earning an estimated salary of about US$1,000 every month.
Martin Musumba prime minister of Busoga Kingdom says the call centre would be up and running by the end of May.
To help facilitate its operations, the government through the ministry of education entered into an agreement with Global Management Consortium-Trade Information Network (GMC-TIN) and Serebra Learning Corporation (Canada) to provide low cost and affordable education in ICT, professional development courses including call technologies and call centre management through a programme known as EasyLearning.
Godfrey Seruwagi, the EasyLearning national project coordinator, said the programme will help in bridging the digital divide through access to ICT education.
Serebra, which owns the courseware has over 3,000 courses in its library but only 400 of those have been negotiated into EasyLearning and are accessible at a cost of Ush12,000 (US$6) per course.
So far, according to Rossette Serwanga, the EasyLearning programme manager, 600 people have sat and passed the online courses since its launch.
Busoga Kingdom set up an e-Learning centre in Jinja called IT Synergies, where they have been training the future call centre operators and managers and are now set to run the first outsourcing centre in the country.