Teso College Aloet is one of the 20 schools chosen to offer Chinese as a language option in the school curriculum, along with Arua Public SSS, St Catherine Girls’ SSS, Trinity College Kabale, Nyakasura School Fort Portal, and Luyanzi College Kampala. The new program is expected to start at the beginning of the 2018 school year.
Ugandans who learn Chinese will be more able to negotiate effectively with Chinese people, and their knowledge of the language and the Chinese way of doing business will only help them in their dealings with this economic powerhouse. According to the Uganda Investment Authority, China has consistently been one of the top 10 investors in Uganda since 2007. As of the end of 2012, there were 200 Chinese businesses in Uganda, giving jobs to more than 30,000 Ugandans.
The Ugandan and Chinese governments have cooperated to fund the importation of Chinese tutors. They will instruct more than 100 Ugandan teachers on how to offer Chinese language classes to Ugandan students. The Chinese government will also pay for more Chinese tutors to extend the new curriculum to more Ugandan secondary schools.
Luyanzi College was the first private secondary school to teach the Chinese language to students at this level. In 2012 they taught 500 students the basics of Chinese, including the phonetic system, writing and grammar. Jimmy Dheyongera, the head teacher at the school, said, “They were trained for three months in Chinese elementary language. They can now talk, greet, ask for water and a way forward and they can bargain in any market using the Chinese language.”
Ugandans who learn Chinese will be more able to negotiate effectively with Chinese people, and their knowledge of the language and the Chinese way of doing business will only help them in their dealings with this economic powerhouse. According to the Uganda Investment Authority, China has consistently been one of the top 10 investors in Uganda since 2007. As of the end of 2012, there were 200 Chinese businesses in Uganda, giving jobs to more than 30,000 Ugandans.
The Minister for Education and Sports, Janet Museveni, wrote, in her message at the second anniversary celebrations of the Founding of the Confucius Institute at Makerere University, that a knowledge of Chinese will be of great benefit to students looking for jobs after graduation. “It is indeed evident Chinese companies are winning most of the construction tenders here and upon winning them, they need Ugandan engineers, sociologists, translators and interpreters to work with them. Therefore learning the language will be a bonus for that job,” she wrote.
The Confucius Institute (CI) was created at Makerere University in collaboration with Xiangtan University in China, and in the past two years has seen more 3,000 Ugandan students register to study the Chinese language and culture.
To learn more about it, read Stephen Otage’s article in Daily Monitor Uganda titled “Uganda to import Chinese teachers”.
Also of interest are these articles:
“Embrace Chinese language – Education Minister” in Dispatch: Uganda News Monthly.
“China to fund teaching of Chinese in Ugandan schools” in New Vision Uganda
“Feature: Ugandans embrace learning Chinese language” by Samuel Egadu Okiror and Ronald Ssekandi in XinhuaNet
