BY IRENE BILENI
ICDL Africa - Is the world’s leading computer certification entity dedicated to raising digital skills standards in the workforce, education and society and has by far penetrated America, Europe, Asia and Africa for the past 25 years, in 100 countries with 20,000 test centers, 17 million candidates and 75 million certification tests.

ICDL empowers digital skills for employability and productivity, providing essential skills as computer online and application essentials, office applications such as documents, spread sheets, data protection and information literacy.

On 19th January 2022, the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance together with ICDL Africa, signed a Memorandum of Understanding. This MoU signifies a formulation of the grand partnership between the two entities for digital skilling. According to Ms. Solange Umulisa the General Manager of ICDL Africa, they commit to support the Government of Uganda to promote and assess digital skills across Government platforms and pledge total support towards the MoU to ensure the journey together for digital transformation. Uganda needs the right digital skills for an effective workforce.

Digital skills have become one of the essentials in a changing world and for us to be able to cope with the changes, the workforce should be given the right digital skills to change Uganda to the better. The Permanent Secretary Dr. Aminah Zawedde emphasized that this partnering is a demonstration of governments commitment to digitalize Uganda. She stated: "Whereas we are in the process of digitizing government, we are still below the 50% in digital skills.

We intend to leverage on the best practices to design programs to design digital skills for government and its employees, enhance digital skills delivery across education systems, reskilling government employees and committees to ensure the MoU is operationalized." The Focus of this MoU is to establish digital skills standard for the work force in Uganda, enhance digital skills training delivery across different structures in our education system, promote skilling and reskilling of government workers to support e-government services and to support the realization of the digital Uganda vision.

The State Minister for ICT Hon. Joyce Nabbosa Ssebugwawo who witnessed the signing ceremony highlighted that the Ministry has a goal to ensure that Uganda becomes a digital enabled country since computer skills enable people of all ages to understand and use technology to improve their personal and professional lives which ultimately contributes to a more coordinated and effective action in driving digital innovation, growth and development in Uganda. "Our citizens must have the competence to fully benefit from the 4th Industrial revolution." She added: "With ICDL we can raise our digital literacy levels to the globally recognized standards in our workforce, education and society." Whereas most people believe they have good digital skills, unless a needs assessment is carried out on an individual or group of people, you cannot really know for sure.

However, studies by our partners across the world indicate that this perception is not reflected in reality Certification is the best way to prove digital skills and to identify skills gap to increase employability, prove your digital skills to potential employers, gain advantage over uncertified candidates and fulfil mandatory requirement for some careers.

Moving forward, ICDL in collaboration with the Ministry of ICT & National Guidance is set to prepare a policy framework to support Digital Uganda Vision, workforce training and certification, general population training and certification, conduct a skills assessment for the workforce, needs analysis, present a report to the Ministry, have a policy guideline on upskilling the workforce’ digital skills, equip the general population with skills to access e-Gov Services and create employment for the youths in the country.

Let us embrace digitizing systems and services for effective efficient service delivery.