Uganda has failed to turn foreign students into an education export industry, according to findings from Makerere-based Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC). Researchers warn that the country has never turned its advantages in the education sector into a serious economic strategy, and the advantage may already be slipping.
Dr. Ibrahim Kasirye, acting executive director of the Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC), says the economic value of foreign students should be beyond the tuition they pay.
He says Uganda needs to rethink how it sees education if it wants to capture more of that value. “Government needs to stop viewing education only as a social investment and start treating it as a tradable service and an economic sector in its own right,” Kasirye says.
The scale of that missed opportunity is visible in the trade figures. Education service exports rose from $31 million in 2015 to $103 million in 2024, while the trade surplus in the sector grew from $28 million to $73 million over the same period.
Foreign student numbers followed a similar climb, from 2,797 in the 2016/17 academic year to 12,786 in 2022/23, before reaching 14,770 in 2024.
Data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs covering 2016 to 2024 shows Somali nationals accounted for 41 percent of regional student arrivals, followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo at 27 percent, Tanzania at 17 percent, and Kenya at 15 percent.
The ministry issued 14,770 student passes to foreign learners over the period, with the region accounting for 31 percent of all student arrivals.
From the EPRC’s research, Uganda’s advantage for foreign learners has been its English-language education system, relative affordability, and a regional reputation built over decades.
Kasirye warns that none of those are guaranteed to hold. He suggests that the country needs to deliberately build on those advantages and develop education into a major tradable service and source of foreign exchange, the way it has done with tourism.
He warns that competitors elsewhere in the region have started professionalising their recruitment of international students, building dedicated marketing offices, scholarship pipelines and partnerships with foreign universities. Uganda’s own tertiary enrolment.
Philemon Okillong, a research analyst at EPRC, says at university level, the picture is more concerning still. Even as the country continues to attract foreign learners overall, university enrolment specifically has stagnated and is now declining.
National Council for Higher Education figures show enrolment falling from about 21,000 students in 2012/13 to 13,000 in 2024/25.
Okillong says much of the growth, he says, has come from young people fleeing instability and conflict in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Eritrea, rather than from a deliberate recruitment effort.
A separate and steadier stream comes from India, Okillong says, with many students choosing Uganda because they have relatives running businesses in the country.
The Ministry of Education acknowledges it has yet to develop a deliberate strategy for converting its growing foreign student population into a competitive education export industry.
Brighton Barugahare, Commissioner in charge of Policy and Research at the Ministry of Education and Sports, says Uganda is earning from foreign students despite limited government investment in developing education as an export sector.
He says government is largely “harvesting where it has not sown”, benefiting from foreign student enrolment without making the investments needed to deliberately grow the market.
Barugahare says regulatory fragmentation and weak data systems compound the problem, making it difficult for government to track the sector, plan effectively and measure the value of education exports.
He argues Uganda needs to treat education as a genuine export sector by setting revenue and international enrolment targets, strengthening partnerships between local and foreign universities, improving recognition of Ugandan qualifications abroad, and investing in student welfare and digital infrastructure.
Barugahare adds that another obstacle is the country’s weak quality signalling.
Prospective students outside the country often have no reliable way to check the quality of Ugandan institutions, programmes or qualifications before they commit. He adds that the country also lacks deliberate international recruitment targets.
Universities rarely set goals for the proportion of foreign students they want to attract, meaning many international learners arrive through personal connections, affordability or circumstance, rather than through any organised recruitment strategy.
Maxwell Odongo, Manager, Development Planning at the National Planning Authority, says quality has to come first if the country wants to compete seriously for international students.
To him, this means investing in qualified academic staff, modern infrastructure, internationally recognised programmes, and research that lifts the country’s university and other institutions’ rankings.
Odongo adds that Uganda should also market its strongest programmes more aggressively, particularly in medicine, health sciences, engineering, teacher education, oil and gas, agriculture and ICT.
He argues universities and tertiary institutions should be run more like export businesses, with stronger international partnerships, targeted marketing and better support systems for the foreign students they already have. Meanwhile, EPRC’s research analyst Okillong frames the deeper problem in trade terms.
He says the country’s education export has focused almost entirely on one of the World Trade Organization’s four recognised modes of trade in services: students physically travelling to Uganda to study.
The other three remain largely untouched. Cross-border digital delivery expanded during and after the COVID-19 pandemic but still serves mostly domestic learners rather than an international market.
Commercial presence, where Ugandan institutions set up branches or franchises abroad, exists only through scattered individual initiatives rather than any coordinated national strategy.
“The revenue that is generated there is not realised by the country directly,” Okillong says, noting that the government has no reliable record of which institutions or individuals have set up education operations abroad.
The fourth channel, the temporary movement of Ugandan teachers, lecturers and other education professionals to work abroad, is similarly unmanaged. Okillong warns this raises the risk of skilled professionals leaving the country for good, rather than returning home once overseas assignments end.
Taken together, the picture that emerges is of a country that built a regional education hub almost by accident, riding on conflict-driven demand and inherited reputation, without ever building the strategy, data systems or institutional discipline to defend it. Unless that changes, the country risks discovering its advantage has quietly moved elsewhere-URN. Give us feedback on this story through our email: kamwokyatimes@gmail.com
