The Honourable Eng. Jonard Asiimwe Akiiki, Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation in the Office of the President, spent his first day at Makerere University immersed in the work of the very people the Ministry exists to support, its researchers, its innovators and, above all, its students. The visit, his maiden engagement with the University since taking up the docket, opened on Tuesday 21 July 2026 under the theme of research infrastructure, emerging technologies and enterprise creation, and by the time the day closed, the Minister had walked through workshops, laboratories and innovation hubs spanning three colleges, each one built around work led substantially by Makerere students at different levels of study.

Setting the tone

The day began with an opening session at which University leadership laid out, in fairly direct terms, the scale of what Makerere is building. The Vice Chancellor took the Minister through the University’s research and innovation strategy, touching on its major infrastructure investments, its externally funded research portfolio, its growing stock of patents and intellectual property, and the start ups and spin off companies that have emerged from University research in recent years. He spoke about commercialised technologies already in use beyond the University gates, about industry partnerships that have grown out of research collaborations, and about the specialised human capital Makerere continues to produce in science, technology and innovation fields. The presentation was framed deliberately around the National Development Plan IV and the Tenfold Growth Strategy, with the Vice Chancellor making the case that Makerere’s research output is not an academic exercise sitting apart from national priorities but a direct contributor to them.

The Minister responded with a strategic vision address of his own, setting out what he expects from the science, technology and innovation sector over the coming years and the role he wants public universities to play in delivering it. What followed was a candid, moderated exchange in which University leadership pressed the Minister on policy direction and the operating environment for research, while he in turn asked pointed questions about how quickly Makerere‘s research strengths can be converted into products, services and enterprises that create jobs and generate revenue. It set the tone for a day that would, from that point on, be less about presentations and more about seeing the work itself.

CEDAT Showcases Seven Projects

That work began in earnest at the College of Engineering, Design, Art and Technology (CEDAT), where the Minister was welcomed by Vice Chancellor Prof. Barnabas Nawangwe and College Principal Prof. Moses Musinguzi, and where senior scholars had presented their innovations directly to him. The Minister did not hide his familiarity with the terrain. “This is my college because I come from engineering mathematics”, he told his hosts, adding that he intended to work with the College under the guidance of the President as the sector moves forward.

He was candid, too, about what he had come to look for. His mission, he explained, as directed by the President, is to ensure that scientists’ projects move beyond the laboratory and into commercialisation. “My mechanism is touch, don’t do things rashly. Whatever you do, ensure it is ready to be seen nationally and internationally”. It was a line that set the tone for the rest of his time at CEDAT, an insistence that promising research findings alone are not enough unless they can be shown to the world and, eventually, sold in it.

The projects put before him bore that out. Researchers presented work on the value addition of tungsten ores into tungsten carbides for sustainable mineral development, a Smart Home Energy Project, and the development of solar water pumps suited to local conditions. CEDAT has Direct Reduction Technology aimed at the metallisation of Ugandan iron ores, and Smart Mobility Corridors that use artificial intelligence and Internet of Things analytics to improve road safety. The College also showcased work on electrifying informal urban transport, built around evidence-based support for the adoption of electric motorcycles, alongside research into the use of iron oxide nanoparticles in the treatment of wastewater and drinking water. Taken as a set, the seven projects made a fairly complete case for what CEDAT researchers and their students have been quietly building, work that spans mineral processing, renewable energy, smart infrastructure, transport and environmental protection.

A walk-through of Living Labs

At the Marconi Research and Innovation Laboratory, engineering students and their supervisors walked him through further work on infrastructure innovations developed within the College, much of it born out of final year projects and postgraduate research that never quite stopped after the marks were awarded. A stop at the MAPRONANO facility introduced the Minister to its scanning electron microscopy and materials characterisation equipment, a resource that has quietly become central to nanotechnology and advanced materials work across several colleges, not just CEDAT.

What became clear as the Minister moved between benches was how much of the College’s engineering output is aimed squarely at problems close to home. Renewable energy prototypes on display were built around the realities of Uganda’s power grid rather than borrowed wholesale from foreign textbooks, and several of the projects, from the tungsten carbide work to the iron ore metallisation research, dealt directly with turning Uganda’s own mineral resources into higher value products. Facility leads explained that this local orientation is deliberate, a way of ensuring that engineering training at Makerere produces graduates who can solve the problems in front of them rather than only the ones described in imported case studies.

Speaking more broadly on the visit, the Minister underscored the role of universities in driving Uganda’s industrialisation and technological advancement, noting Makerere‘s long legacy in publishing and pledging to help it become a hub for commercialisation as well. “Our future prosperity depends on strengthening our scientific base and ensuring innovation is locally developed and supported”, he said. Prof. Musinguzi thanked the Ministry for its support, affirming that Makerere remains committed to championing academic and research excellence in Uganda and the region.

Strides made in Artificial Intelligence

From CEDAT, the delegation moved to the Research and Education Network for Uganda and the College of Computing and Information Sciences, where the conversation shifted from workshops and welding to compute power and code. The centrepiece here was the National AI Research Cloud hosted at RENU, a facility that gives researchers and students across the country access to the kind of computing infrastructure that serious artificial intelligence work demands, infrastructure that would otherwise be well beyond the reach of most individual departments. Inside the College’s Artificial Intelligence and Data Science laboratories, the Minister was shown a range of applications built on this infrastructure, many of them the direct output of graduate and undergraduate research projects rather than staff led initiatives handed down from above.

The applications on display touched health, agriculture, environment, climate, cybersecurity and public service delivery, a spread that gave a fair sense of just how broadly Makerere‘s computing talent has been put to work. Lab leads walked the Minister through how student teams had identified real problems, in some cases working directly with government agencies or private sector partners, and built working systems around them. Among the examples presented were tools built by student researchers to support disease surveillance and diagnosis, systems designed to help farmers make better decisions using satellite and sensor data, and early-stage cybersecurity tools developed to protect the kind of digital public services the government has been rolling out in recent years. The Minister, for his part, pushed the conversation toward questions of governance and access, wanting to understand how a shared national resource like the AI Research Cloud is allocated, how its operating costs are sustained, and what it would take to scale similar compute access to other public universities. It is, after all, one thing to build a laboratory full of promising student projects, and quite another to build the national infrastructure that lets such laboratories multiply.

Exploring Agricultural Value Chains

The final stop of the segment covered here was the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES), where the focus turned from digital systems to the physical business of turning raw produce into finished, marketable products. At the Food Technology and Business Incubation Centre, the Minister toured facilities for agricultural engineering fabrication, mechanisation and post harvest handling, the kind of unglamorous but essential technology that determines whether a farmer’s harvest reaches a processor intact or spoils before it gets there. Alongside this, the Centre showcased its food formulation, pilot processing, quality assurance and packaging capabilities, all of them built around a philosophy of taking a product from laboratory bench to shop shelf without students having to leave campus to find the equipment to do it.

Much of what the Minister saw at the Centre had been developed by students working through the Incubation programme, turning coursework and research interests into small, functioning enterprises. Demonstrations centred on some of the country’s priority value chains, coffee, banana, dairy, cereals and fruits among them, with young entrepreneurs presenting finished or near finished products alongside the research that had gone into developing them. Several of the enterprises on display had already moved beyond the prototype stage, with student founders explaining how they had navigated food safety certification, sourced packaging, and begun testing their products with real customers, small but telling steps that separate a good idea from an actual business. For a Ministry keen on enterprise creation as much as pure research output, it was arguably the clearest illustration yet of the day’s underlying argument, that Makerere‘s students are not simply studying science and technology in the abstract but are already building businesses around it, often before they have even graduated.

Taking Stock of an Engaging First Day

Taken together, the four stops covered on the first day, the opening strategic session, the engineering and manufacturing tour at CEDAT, the digital and artificial intelligence infrastructure at RENU and CoCIS, and the food technology and agro industrial work at CAES, offered the Minister a cross section of a university whose research culture runs considerably deeper than its published output alone would suggest. What stood out consistently across the four was the extent to which students themselves, rather than only senior researchers, were the ones presenting the work, explaining the thinking behind it, and answering the Minister’s questions directly. University officials were keen to point this out at every stop, framing it as evidence that Makerere is not merely producing research papers but producing a generation of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs already at work on the problems the Ministry has been asked to help solve.

The Minister’s first day at Makerere continued beyond the stops covered here, taking him further into the University’s natural sciences platforms and its innovation and enterprise pipeline before the day’s programme drew to a close. His engagement with the University resumes on Wednesday, 22 July 2026, with a second day focused on health and life sciences, before culminating in a strategic dialogue between Makerere and the Ministry and the adoption of an agreed action matrix to guide follow up work between the two institutions.