Dan Odongo, Executive Director of Uganda National Examination Board
The Uganda National Examination Board’s sensitive data for the past 72years is manually stored at the Board’s premises in Ntinda, with no offsite facility to backup this data in case of any disaster.
Dan Odongo, Executive Director of Uganda National Examination Board (UNEB) made the revelation last week while appearing before Parliament’s Education Committee, where he had been summoned to respond to some of the queries raised during the consideration of the 2026/27 National Budget Framework Paper by the Budget Committee.
“The Board is maintaining data of people who sat examinations right from 1954, and they are all archived in the Board’s offices, if anything were to happen, any disaster was to happen, all this data will be lost. So, we have been pleading that we be assisted to establish functional disaster and business continuity offices,” revealed Odongo.
The revelation shocked MPs who wondered how UNEB can operate without an offsite store yet there are organisations that aren’t holding data that is as sensitive as UNEB’s but invested in offsite facilities 20years back.
“I am even shocked to hear that with all the sensitivity of the documents of UNEB, we were still not having offsite storage of their data, that is a disaster itself. In my simple way, when I was working with those organisations, they are simple, they are not as sensitive as UNEB, but still at that point, and I can say more than 20 years ago, we would already store a lot of our data offsite. I think that is an area that we need to ensure that it is funded. There should be no question about it,” Emmanuel Ongiertho, the Jonam County Ongiertho MP, said.
UNEB requested for UGX46.5Bn for its ICT service transformation and modernisation over the medium term that will cover three components including the exponential increase in the data the Board has been receiving in the past years and also update its current 10year old assessment system that isn’t in tandem with the changes in assessment of candidates.
“The data that we received in 2024 alone, was more than the data which we received over the period of 10years for the UCE. Most of the systems we have in place now have been in use for nearly 10years and the rapid development in ICT requires that the Board re-engineers its systems to accommodate modern developments, like electronics core management system that we are outing in place, reserve management system that has had to change because of the change in assessment and our own transformation is projected to cost UGX46.5Bn over the medium term,”
Odongo said.
The UNEB boss told MPs that in the 2026/27 national budget, the required funding is UGX9.5Bn to start the implementation of this ICT revamp, but the available funding is only UGX900Million, giving us a funding gap of UGX8.6Bn.
