Buganda cultural camp goes firm on coding and digital skills
The Nnaabagereka of Buganda Sylvia Nagginda and Katikkiro Charles Peter Mayiga during the closing ceremony of the Buganda Kingdom mentorship camp, known as the Ekisaakaate on January 20, 2024. PHOTO | COURTESY
What you need to know:
- While closing the royal camp on Sunday, Buganda Kingdom Prime Minister Charles Peter Mayiga, also known as the Katikkiro, stated that this year's mentorship which lasted sixteen days, was heavily focused on helping children fit in with the modern world.
With a fresh cherry of digital and coding skills this year, the Buganda Kingdom mentorship camp, known as the Ekisaakaate concluded on Saturday, having equipped hundreds of youngsters with morals, entrepreneurial and the core soft skills the modern world longs for.
The kingdom had to collaborate with telecom service provider MTN to supply its cutting-edge technology and technocrats, who trained children aged nine to nineteen expertise of computer usage and the fundamentals of programming—a skill that students in the prior camps weren’t equipped with.
“These children have been exposed to coding over a period of a week and a half under super high broadband network access that enabled them have these skills tomorrow’s world hunger’s for,” said Steven Mutana, the chief strategy manager of MTN’s fintech arm.
Technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate with benefits that trigger improvements in health, education, and other facets of life, but it also has significant drawbacks, according to the organisers of Ekisaakaate, which require training for the young generation.
A lot of jobs nowadays require digital skills, especially with technological advancements like artificial intelligence (AI) opening up new possibilities that could expose several young adults to bias, misinformation, and online predators, according to UNICEF’s 2024 children outlook.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) last week published a report worrying that if artificial intelligence continues on its current trajectory, it will probably replace a significant portion of the tasks that people now do for a living without producing a sufficient number of equally valuable or prevalent replacement jobs in a given economy, particularly 28 to 40 percent in the least developing countries.
Stephanie Bell, a Senior Research Scientist at the Partnership on AI's Labour and Economy program, told the IMF that the AI revolution appears to be having a much more aggressive impact on our jobs than the advancements that computers and social media brought about because it’s replacing human labour instead of complementing it.
“You can see cascading effects on returns to skills in human capital and the ways that might not go so well for people who have spent their whole lives accumulating skills that can now be completed by algorithms or robots,” she explained.
While closing the royal camp on Saturday, Buganda Kingdom Prime Minister Charles Peter Mayiga, also known as the Katikkiro, stated that this year's mentorship which lasted sixteen days, was heavily focused on helping children fit in with the modern world.
He explained that most of today’s teenagers spend the majority of their time at school and are assisted by house helps when they get home, which negatively impacts their well-being in the harsh world of today.
Data from UNICEF research projects a positive picture of children's health, education, nutrition, and general well-being this year especially with the slow pace of inflation and how governments have learnt to shrink the dependence burden in the sub Saharan Africa.
However, to make this future a reality, the UN agency in charge of protecting children’s human rights contends that policies cantered on funding universal health care and education are necessary to guarantee that every child has fair access to opportunities.
According to its 2024 global outlook, which focused on prospects for children in particular, UNICEF explained that "technological innovation offers promise, but its benefits may be muted without policies that prioritize equity and sustainability."
Meanwhile, children enrolled in Universal Primary Education were found to be taught incomplete syllabi in a recent government audit for the 2022/2023 fiscal year. According to Auditor General John Muwanga, this severely limits students' understanding and proficiency in critical exam subjects, which has a direct impact on their overall academic performance.
"The failure to complete the syllabi was attributed to excessive teacher workload, loss of time by teachers while commuting, and late reporting of pupils at the beginning of term," he explained, speaking about a program that serves 8.6 million children, according to Uganda Bureau of Statistics (Ubos) data.
