professionals who can accept the low remuneration that government offers. Furthermore, the IT
profession in government is not yet centralized. The Ministry of ICT has not yet taken position
on guiding IT professionals in the various government institutions as a result in-service training
for capacity building and skills enhancement for both IT and non IT professionals are still
lacking.
The industry has got a big knowledge base of IT graduates although they lack specific
professional skills. The government has in place Uganda Institute of Information and
Communications Technology (UICT) to impart professional skills among the graduates but the
school is inadequately funded and equipped to provide the required services to the population.
Legal Framework: The country still has a very weak legislation pertaining to this industry.
Laws related to Intellectual Property Rights, Data Security, Privacy, Data Protection and cyber
crimes are still in infancy and where they exist, enforcement is still low and others are outdated.
The existing Acts need to be amended to address the gaps which have been identified in this IT
Policy.
Infrastructure: The local IT industry requires a world class enabling infrastructure. The country
is currently dependent on satellite connection to connect to the rest of the world which is slow
and costly. This has led to high communications costs in both data and voice transmissions. The
current bandwidth costs are exorbitantly high hence limiting the usage of Internet in the country.
The private sector has led the race to connecting to the submarine cables at Mombasa.
The government has laid the National Backbone Infrastructure (NBI) which now connects 27
Ministries and 2 Departments connected with video conferencing facilities. Currently, this only
covers central government although expansion of the infrastructure to all government MDAs,
Local Governments, and hard to reach areas is underway. This is in addition to the fibre cables
already laid down by the private sector and cover the larger part of the nation but are
strategically laid in the more profitable urban areas. Government efforts should be geared
towards establishing evenly distributed infrastructure with in the country.
Software and Hardware Industry: Software development is a high growth industry and forms
a major segment of the vast IT market. It will continue to do so in the future. The software
development industry is still on a very low scale and majorly consumed by only the local
market. There is hardly any assembling and development of hardware in the country; only
hardware refurbishment is done on a very small scale and is private sector led. The hardware
assembly and software development industries are still lacking in capacity.
Research and development: Research and development in this industry is currently very low.
Activity in this area is mainly in institutions of higher learning which are doing it at a small
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