The vocational route is finally getting honest treatment

For a long time, parents talked about UBTEB as a fallback. That framing is shifting fast, partly because youth unemployment among UCE-leavers has stayed punishingly high, and partly because the country is short of the trades that vocational institutes actually train people for.

Nakawa VTI alone graduated 1,200 students last year. Of those, the institute claims 71% were in skilled employment within six months. We pulled enrolment data, talked to recent graduates, and matched the numbers to BoU labour-market reporting.