Makerere University: Education is Key to Change Lives and Develop Uganda Says Barnabas Nawangwe

Professor Barnabas Nawangwe, Vice Chancellor of Makerere University, explains what inspired him to get into the field of education. Makerere University, the Harvard of Africa, is Uganda’s largest and oldest institution of higher learning.

“I am a trained architect. I got very interested in the vernacular architecture. And when I came back from the Soviet Union where I studied, I looked around my country and I saw that a lot of the heritage was actually disappearing. I put my effort into recording the architectural heritage of this country. As I went ahead, of course, I got interested in the quality of life of the people here in Uganda. And I realized that homesteads where people were educated were much better off than homesteads where maybe they did not have anybody educated at a high level. I began to realize that if we want to change the lives of our people, education is key. And I personally now believe that without education, and particularly higher education, being very much involved in the development agenda of this country, we are very unlikely to transform our society and improve people’s livelihoods. So, from that time when I saw those conditions, I thought that I must make a contribution. And my contribution is in improving the way our university contributes to national development. I have traveled widely, and I have seen what universities can do to change their societies. I have been to places like Malaysia, India, China, and I have seen what the universities there have done to contribute to changing their societies and I have seen that universities in Africa are lagging behind in that. So, I got the conviction that we must change the way our universities work. We must increase the research in these universities. We must increase the contribution, even to the local communities, by the universities. Therefore, I decided that I must do something. I must do something to transform the way universities in Africa work. So, a lot of my work has been on raising resources for our researchers to do research. Coming up with innovations is something that I am passionate about. I am convinced that this is what we have to do. I have had people ask on several occasions why we are spending so much money and what can be done. What can universities do apart from producing people who are looking for jobs? We are changing that. I always give an example of a very bad famine which happened in eastern Uganda about 15 years ago. Thousands of people were starving and hundreds were dying because there was a long drought followed by famine. A group of researchers at Makerere and another research facility in Uganda came up with a variety of cassava, which is resistance to drought, and this was distributed to the communities in eastern Uganda. Since that time, we have had droughts which are even worse than that drought which caused a lot of suffering. But we have not had anybody starving in eastern Uganda because of that one single innovation. I always say that you do not need so many people to cause a change, but you need a few people with the knowledge to cause that change”, says Professor Barnabas Nawangwe.

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