In 2004/5 over US $30 million came into Uganda from education services, the fourth highest external earner after remittances by Ugandan nationals, coffee, and fish exports, according to New Vision. Although this statistic is a bit outdated, it is clear that there is an enormous investment opportunity here. In 2006 non-Ugandans made up 13% of the student population enrolled in universities, and in total over 30,000 non-Ugandan students were enrolled at all levels of the education sector. See this report by the Uganda Export Promotion Board for an analysis of potential opportunities and challenges in this sector and others.
Although there is money to be made on this front, perhaps more important is the fact that the sector is as yet unprepared for the massive influx of students that are about to come through the ranks from primary school. There are over 7 million primary students in Uganda today — a full quarter of the population — and currently not enough teachers or classrooms to teach them when they reach secondary school. Over 450,000 sat for their primary exit examinations in 2006, but only half were able to continue to secondary school due to space and capacity constraints. And of course at some point one has to wonder what jobs will be available for these millions of students when they graduate in a few years time…
Melina Raquel Platas 
Why not publicize? Many pepole read Ugblogs, but without the publicity, how will they know about the awards?Antipop, do you know how many pepole voted in last year’s awards? Dee and Jackfruity can provide the exact figures. It was a paltry number; far fewer than the number of hits I get on my blog everyday.Perhaps you are not interested in the growth of blogging in Uganda. Perhaps you are not interested in highlighting the work of bloggers, many including yourself Antipop, who do a good job.The Ugbloggers I know are funny, insightful, controversial, intelligent and yes, some are plain silly but someone out there needs to know about them. The awards are a good opportunity to spread the word. The awards are a great opportunity.No, Antipop, I won’t be asking you to write a piece on the awards, so you can relax. I’ll ask the person sitting next to you.Erique, there are numerous ways we can improve publicity. In the blogsphere you increase knowledge about your page through one main route linkage! Link, link, link! Link with twitter. Link with blogger. Link with facebook. Link with Node Six. Link with Afrigator. Link. We also know that some respected’ radio DJs are regular blog readers. Some even have their own blogs. A mention or two won’t hurt. It may even expose us to a greater number of Ugbloggers in the http://WWW.I disagree with you Ivan about the awards being recognition of bloggers by bloggers. How on earth can that be achieved given that the Ugbloggers on your blogroll (or on Node Six) are not representative of even half the Ugbloggers on the WWW who have no idea what’s going on? C’mon pepole. We can do better than have the Ugblogs turned into a chest-thumping session for the Mateos gang. (I love the Mateos gang for real sometimes).tumwijuke’s last blog post..