Minister gives Uganda two years to find markets for its innovations
Uganda's Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation, Eng. Jonard Asiimwe Akiiki, on August 7, 2026 opened a stakeholder consultative engagement aimed at building the Engineering Design and Innovation Centre (EDiC) into a sustainable national engineering centre of excellence.
The engagement brought together engineers, university leaders, policy analysts, government officials, and industry stakeholders to chart EDiC's institutional, technical, and commercial direction, with a particular focus on evidence based policy, commercialization, quality management and control, industry linkages, and public private partnerships.
"Engineering is no longer an option. Japan took it personally; its limited land mass pushed it to embrace science, technology, and innovation. There is no developed country that is not industrialized. We need to take engineering personally as a country," Asiimwe Akiiki said.
He called for stronger systems across Uganda's science, technology and innovation (STI) ecosystem to move innovations beyond ideas and prototypes into manufacturing and commercialization, and urged urgency in expanding export markets for Ugandan innovative products.
"We do not have time. In the next two years, we should be moving to countries such as Malawi and elsewhere, looking for bigger markets for our innovative products," he said.
The engagement forms part of the STI Secretariat's drive to build a coordinated national engineering ecosystem capable of developing competitive Ugandan products, strengthening industrialization, expanding regional and international markets, and contributing to Uganda's ambition to build a US$500 billion economy by 2040.
