Makerere University will start running the Kiswahili PhD courses in the year 2025/2026, and this was made public after Dr. Boaz Mutungi, a lecturer at the Department of African Languages and Literature in Kiswahili, informed the Parliament Committee on Gender, Labor and Social Development of the same.
Dr. Mutungi intimated that Makerere University is well-set to roll out these doctoral programs because the university has, over a number of years, built a strong department in Kiswahili. The university started offering Kiswahili as early as the early 1930s, a program that later revitalized in the 1990s. Currently, the teaching is done at undergraduate and graduate levels.
This follows the proposed Uganda National Kiswahili Council Bill 2023, which seeks to increase efforts to popularise and implement the use of Kiswahili in the country. Speaking to media about the importance of extending the Kiswahili programme, Dr. Mutungi said, “I think in the next academic year, we shall begin teaching PhDs in Kiswahili because we have now over six PhDs, and the two that are remaining are also completing.”
Along with announcing the PhD programme, the delegation also gave their stance on a bill concerning the Uganda National Kiswahili Council: it should, they urged, include religious leaders. Faith-based organizations command a huge share of Uganda’s education system, hence should be represented in order to help drive the demand for Kiswahili learning within schools.
The Ugandan government finally approved Kiswahili as an official language in the year 2022 and made its inclusion as a compulsory subject in primary and secondary a must. Part of this drive has been the establishment of the Uganda National Kiswahili Council in 2019 in accordance with the decision of the 21st East African Community Summit in February 2021, which dictated the need to fast-track the process of implementing Kiswahili as one of the official languages in the East African Community bloc, besides English and French.
