Beyond the Degree:

In Namungoona, a suburb located Northwest of Uganda’s capital Kampala, the morning sun brightens at about 8 a.m, and that’s when Mariam Najjuka moves pieces of her hand-made jewelry to well-laid out spaces for photographs.

By the time Najjuka’s peers in formal and informal employment clock in at their workstations, she’s already posted the pieces on her TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp stories. They are her target customers. 

This is the job now. Not the one she trained for, but the one that pays some bills.

“I realized I could no longer ask my parents for everything,” she says. 

Najjuka graduated about three years ago, with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Livingstone International University, but never chanced a place in the job market.  

“I had sent out multiple applications without success that is how I came up with this business with capital from my elder sister,” she explains mulling over the investment in the three years of University education. 

A stone throw-away from Najjuka’s residence is the entrance of Metropolitan University where her mother Molly Katushabe runs a merchandize shop. She is equally frustrated with what the daughter is doing currently. 

“I educated my girl with hopes of her finishing and getting a job to have a better life,” she says, adding that “my heart aches as a parent seeing my child home,”

“I think the government and those responsible should change the system and ensure that the educated get jobs worth their qualifications,” she says. 

Many young graduates in Uganda have started to question the cost of education in relation to the available job opportunities. 

“I wish I had focused more on skills, networking,”  Najjuka says. Asked what a decent job looks like now, she names a number: around 800,000 shillings a month:  not a fortune, just enough to call it a living.

Uganda’s universities roll over 700,000 young people into the job market but Not all of them are walking into jobs that exist yet.

In a bid to fix this gap, Uganda is switching its schools from a system built around memorizing facts for exams to one built around usable skill. This they believe would help to make graduates more entrepreneurial. 

According to Rehema Kagoda, a lecturer at Livingstone International University, the first cohort of learners from this new approach are likely to reach University in 2027, and it will be about 4 years after that this model will be assessed. 

However, Kagoda says “the people that have not gotten jobs should not determine their future. Let them work so hard and make sure that they acquire a skill and also to network.” 

Uganda’s bigger jobs plan is aimed at the future, not today’s backlog. The government wants to cut youth unemployment to 12.9% by 2030, and help create close to 900,000 jobs a year to get there. 

In Uganda’s youth unemployment equation, the other issue has been the skills gap.  According to the Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC) and the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS), youth underutilization is beyond 40%, driven heavily by structural disconnects between academia and market demands.

According to Shamim Walusimbi, an Kampala-based Human Resource consultant Universities have chased volume over quality.

“Most graduates come in without any understanding of how to put everything that they have learnt into practice,” she explains.

When she’s hiring, the degree matters less than three things: “your attitude… emotional intelligence …and how is the body language, because communication is not only about what you say with your mouth.”

On what a broken system does to people who did everything right: “If you are trusting a particular process and that trust is broken, sooner or later you’ll feel like you have no purpose in life.”

John Kakungulu Walugembe is a business economist and executive director of the Federation of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises  Uganda (FSME), which represents over 112,000 small businesses. There is a lot of potential in entrepreneurship for young Ugandans if there is deliberate action from the government. 

“We have too many young people who are trained in fields the market doesn’t need, often because universities never checked what the market wanted,” he says. “Do they do a labor market survey? Do they get in touch with the employers?,” he asks. 

His view is that the government should lower smartphone and data costs and less tax on mobile money, a fight that lands directly on someone like, who pays for data and collects payments by mobile money to run her business.

A different kind of story is unfolding not far from Mariam’s phone and beads  one that started from an even harder place.

Across Kampala, Emmanuel Trinity Nsabanye is developing Era92, a social enterprise that is 

Era92 trains young people in on-demand digital skills, matched to real demand from employers abroad, and helps its most entrepreneurial graduates start their own businesses. It has created over 5,000 skilled jobs so far, aiming for 100,000. 

“We are just one drop in the ocean,” Trinity says  but he’s proud that 70% of his own team came through the program, including his first-ever trainee, now the organization’s operations lead.

Nsabanya It isn’t a fix for the whole system. But it’s proof the gap between “unemployable graduate” and “skilled professional” can close faster than government or university programs currently manage, when training is tied directly to a waiting employer.

None of these ideas are currently making sense to Najjuka and her mom or what they are doing.

Yet her story isn’t unique. It is the story of a generation that did what it was told: study hard, get the degree, wait your turn and is still waiting for a door that was promised to open. 

There is a need to shift from the narrative to getting oriented early into the economic reality of our country so that both parents and students can plan a future with certainty,” she says.