Tourism institute toasts to big feat with half full glass

The air of optimism around Jinja-based Uganda Hotel and Tourism Training Institute (UHTTI) is sweet enough to scent a month-long carnival.
Last month, Joel Makongo returned from the WorldSkills in Belgium with a bronze medal for his excellence in the pastry and bakery competition.
“We now know where to invest the money,” Mr Richard Kawere, the principal of the institute, says. 
“We are going to invest in this and I want to congratulate Joel for making us proud,” he adds.

The global shine, a second bronze in two years, comes on the back of UHTTI’s mother hotel, the three-star Crested Crane, counting down the clock to a grand reopening following a Shs16b refurbishment. The institute itself was taken down for a Shs20b evolution that should see it return with a new structure that is expected to offer almost everything it has lacked until now.

And as the government showered Jinja with jingles of tourism redevelopment, UHTTI, the only public institution offering tailored skills training for the leisure and hospitality sector, was looking into a half-full glass. That optimism is expected in a country where the once famous colleges of commerce that trained skilled manpower are hardly mentioned anywhere as institutions of higher learning today.

Half-empty glass
Yet there is also the proverbial half-empty glass. Makongo, for instance, would have loved to further his studies with a degree programme, but the institution he says he is indebted to is yet to get to such a level. Uganda Management Institute, Multitech Business School, YMCA Comprehensive Institute and Webminster Christian Institute, have over the last decade taken to the allure of degrees but UHTTI has stayed true to its principles.

Just for how long, though? Dr Vincent Ssembatya, the officer-in-charge of quality control at the National Council for Higher Education, says an institution like UHTTI has several options.

“Affiliation is the easiest,” says the official at the agency that approves higher education programmes in the country, adding, “They can become an ‘Other Degree Awarding Institution’ [below the level of fully-fledged universities] as a second option. The third option is to become a university.”

Mr Kawere admits upgrading to degree programmes is something they would consider, but only as a collaboration in the medium-term.
“We are looking at responsiveness to the job market,” he says, adding, “When you graduate 20 human resources managers, an organisation will only take in one, but if you have 20 hoteliers … a hotel will need a dozen chefs.”

Kawere says UHTTI would need adequate infrastructure, proper staffing, ICT and sustainable financing mechanisms to join the degree queue.
“It is important to instead understand the skillset,” he reasons.
The UHTTI ethos is one Ms Doreen Katusiime, the permanent secretary (PS) at the Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities, also sells, saying the concern should be about the skills one acquires from such an institute and not the paper qualification.

“You have so many degree holders who are not employed because they lack skills,” she says.
The PS says the government’s priority is to restructure UHTTI and transform it into a centre of excellence in relevant skills by developing the appropriate infrastructure, equipment and human resources capacity.

Skilled enough?
In 2019, a teenage Makongo could not continue his secondary education at Jinja College after O-Level. He enrolled for a certificate course at UHTTI. Makongo loved literature and had dreams of becoming a writer. But fate had drawn him into a hotel and to his own surprise, he was enticed by everything.

Filled with camaraderie, he decided to upgrade his certificate when he was told his performance qualified him for a scholarship. The 21-year-old from Bugiri abandoned gigs he was into to pursue a Diploma in Pastry and Bakery. He feels at home with his calling now. 

Arriving for this interview, Makongo is tucked in a maroon three-piece top with matching trousers and a gold tie decked over a spotless long-sleeved white shirt. His stance tells it all. With one hand folded behind him, the other folded around his midrib, he proffers a greeting, like a waiter at the service of a diner.
“From the way you move to how you handle yourself, everything has to be professional, not like the casual way of doing things in the kitchen at home,” he says later.

Makongo is taken aback when asked if he could prepare local dishes or mingle ugali as this writer sought to dig a fork into the relationship between basic cooking and the professional setting he now operates in.
“I do cook, I can mingle ugali, yes, but there is a difference with what I do here,” he offers, but then realises the deep relationship.

Spotless
Hygiene. The backbone of the kitchen, or food preparation in whatever form. And Makongo’s pastry and bakery where he has to prepare an assortment for breakfast, dessert or buffet cakes, ice cream all come in a pot of hygiene.

The fate that dragged Makongo away from his journalism dream was no doubt a benevolent one. With a journalism degree, he would be in an increasingly shrinking media milieu, where some find solace in news portals to survive.
Makongo looks back with immense pride at that trip to Belgium for the WorldSkills competition, billed as a gold standard of skills excellence, inspiring young competitors to turn their passion into a profession.
“It was the first time I was moving out of the country and it is amazing,” he says.

Makongo was the only Ugandan student at the competition. In 2022, Hussama Mugerwa, also from UHTTI, scooped bronze in the restaurant services category in Namibia. 
Daniel Bakabinge, the head of the bakery and pastry at the institute, says the department will now embark on winning gold in next year’s competitions in Leon, France.

Hungry for more
Makongo says his appetite for learning has only just aroused. UHTTI is, however, only just mulling over the kinds of programmes that would suit graduates like him, who have probably outgrown the institution. Yet a rush to degree programme could only water down the institution’s ethos.
“The government will continue to accord importance and increase resources allocated to the skilling of the tourism workforce,” Col Tom Butime, the Tourism minister, said at the last graduation in November.

The government allocates Shs7.7b to UHTTI annually, with the money also going into staff salary and other operational costs, including conducting practical sessions that Mr Kawere says are costly since theirs is a hands-on institute that requires daily materials. 
Mr Daniel Kazungu, the UHTTI spokesperson, says in addition to the government funding, the institute collects about Shs1.4b per semester in tuition and also receives funds from International Labour Organisation and the UN Development (ILO/UNDP) refugee apprentice programme, as well as government agencies like the central bank, whose staff study short courses at the institute.

For now UHTTI—currently ensconced at the former Makerere Business School campus on Kampala Road in Jinja City, due to the ongoing construction of its home—is in no rush to join the mad dash for degrees that are now increasingly commercialised. Yet considering that one can be skilled in a degree programme, a sense that the glass if half-empty lingers on.
But a public institution that can keep its head above the murky waters in an endemic culture of mismanagement surely deserves to see a lot of half-full glasses about its sustainability.

Quick glance at UHTTI
The UHTTI was established at Fairway Hotel in Kampala in the mid-1980s as a pilot school whose funding was heavily met by the International Labour Organisation and the UN Development (ILO/UNDP) Programme. When Fairway Hotel was repossessed by its original owners in 1991, ILO/UNDP pulled out of the project, leaving it entirely to the government, who subsequently moved the institute to Crested Cranes Hotel in Jinja.