Exploit Microsoft to grow knowledge economy

Uganda should embrace with excitement, its deal with Microsoft Corporation to enhance ICT skills and innovation in the country. Even when this comes three years after our neighbour Kenya inked a similar agreement in April 2015, this should be our great leap forward to grow our knowledge economy.

This deal is crucial as it allows our budding tech savvy innovators to tap into Microsoft technical expertise, access their top of the range platforms and assist our innovators to create, develop and manage next generation of ICT apps. This couldn’t have come any better than with Microsoft Corporation, the world’s sixth-largest information technology company by revenue, which will make the apps commercially available.
With this new move, many of our students’ practical ICT projects now stand the chance of being made more relevant beyond mere demands to fulfil academic requirements. The deal should be able to assist our ICT project students with technical advice, take their innovations forward, nurture and progress best ideas to innovation hubs.

From here, Microsoft should help develop those ICT product or service innovations into commercially viable entities. This should also translate into real prospect of creating indigenous crop of both innovative entrepreneurs and globally employable ICT experts, capable of producing widely marketable ICT products and services.

This is workable because world over, information economies use knowledge as the primary raw material and source of value, and is integrated with communication and data processing technologies to spur economic growth.
This should, therefore, mean Uganda should be able to create more information workers and information products. This would also imply that ICT networks would be able to link our economic institutions, organisations, and processes with great ease.

This is why it is crucial that we embrace this deal to champion ICT as one of the core pillars of transforming Uganda’s economy. This cooperation should also help thousands of our business entities get presence online and gain more visibility to grow business both locally and globally.
In sum, should this collaboration be well-managed, sustained and worked well with academic and training institutions, Uganda should build the potential to put the next generation of Ugandans in very good stead to acquire, create, disseminate, and use ICT knowledge more effectively for greater economic and social development.

Uganda would also be able to diversify and move our skills set from labour-based to knowledge-based economy, which should be a huge propeller to our dream of attaining middle income economy. Precisely, this is why Uganda should harness this collaboration and enthusiastically tap into this all-important ICT deal to stimulate our economy.