One day, when the NRM leaves state power, in its wake will be a Uganda that is almost beyond repair or rebooting. On the face of it, the NRM has achieved impressive results, for example, in increasing the number of enrolled children in school from the primary to secondary level. There are more than 30 universities in the country, spread across all four main regions. It’s only when one goes beneath appearances and scratches on the surface that one realises that all this is a half-baked affair.
A whole generation of Ugandans has grown up on sub-standard education. Most can’t get the spelling and punctuation right in a single sentence, both in English and their own languages. Less than 40 percent of university graduates can write a formal application letter. Not many LCI chairpersons in the country can do so.
Poor customer care is one of the most frustrating daily experiences for Ugandans. The only immediate and medium-term solution, as far as I can tell, is artificial intelligence (AI).
Figures from the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) indicate that the number of smartphone handsets in the country as of 2024 was 18.2 million.
If true, this is more than is required to be put to use to rescue this unfortunate country. A concerted effort involving all kinds and levels of leadership must be made toward this goal. Ugandans must be made to see that there’s more to a smartphone than being used for sports betting and watching short videos on TikTok.
AI software and apps, in effect, turn every smartphone into a premium handset in the same league as Apple’s iPhones and Samsung’s Galaxy series.
Internet search engines like Yahoo!, AltaVista, and Lycos in the late 1990s did so much to fill in the gap left by the decline and eventual disappearance of public libraries in the main towns. They also plastered over the numerous incompetencies of civil service and Local Government offices. The search engine Google, in the mid-2000s, completed and improved upon this desperately-needed informational service. However, even with information retrieved online, one still had to turn it into school homework and university coursework, website content and government reports, and here the inadequacy of the Ugandan workforce was revealed.
Low-hanging fruit that AI can handle at the lowest level of Ugandan society includes such things as drafting application letters or letters of introduction.
It can do spellchecking (although even if this were all it did, it would be such a crucial contribution to Uganda). At a more advanced level, AI can help area politicians, such as MPs and District chairpersons, write development plans or do basic research. Hundreds of thousands of school-age Ugandan children have been left to their own devices in UPE schools, in which they simply stand no chance of ever competing with children from the more expensive private schools.
Furthermore, AI can help the tens of thousands of small businesses research the market for their products and services.
One is left heartbroken to see so many small businesses across the country struggle in markets they have no accurate information on, and for which just a little business research could help them more efficiently find customers. In our many rural or peri-urban government health centres with their unmotivated doctors and nurses, AI can increase their access to up-to-date medical information to the same level as the leading private hospitals in Kampala. The Ugandan news media, itself, could do with five times more AI than it currently uses. Over the last five years, the media has lost much of its self-confidence as audiences migrate in droves to social media platforms.
Ironies of AI
As I’ve mentioned on social media, one of the ironies of AI is to return to traditional media and other established names as the main sources of material for systems like Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Because of its erratic and unedited nature, social media is the least reliable source of reference material for the AI chatbots. For all the many weaknesses of traditional media, at least some basic editing, fact-checking, and legal consultation are done before content is aired or printed, giving established media a much better score on reliability than social media.
If the over-abused idea of holding workshops and seminars can be rehabilitated, this would be the one time the country could do with workshops. As I noted here at the start of the 2026 General Election campaign season, not one of the presidential candidates or ruling and Opposition parties is discussing AI in any shape or form.
This alone indicates that there is little hope for a better Uganda, regardless of the outcome of the 2026 General Election. The more one travels through or thinks about Uganda’s many districts, with their skeletal staffing and resources, and the poor rural population that suffers daily under these conditions, the more one sees AI not just as a fancy toy for tech nerds, but a vital force multiplier in a society and economy such as is Uganda. AI, if put to use, will be the tool that smelts the huge pile of Ugandan manpower ore and turns it into bars of copper.
AI is Uganda’s last remaining hope.