Kyambogo, January 17, 2025: On behalf of its suppliers and contractors, EACOP signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Kyambogo University. The MoU will offer a framework to direct cooperation between the two sides in order to make the National Content Capacity Building projects a reality.
A project business called East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) Ltd. was established to design, construct, and run a pipeline system that will move crude oil from Kabaale, Uganda, to the port of Tanga, Tanzania. Due to the nature of the project, a number of domestic and foreign suppliers and contractors will assist with various facets and scopes of the pipeline’s construction, while others will also provide custom equipment for the pipeline.
“This partnership expands on EACOP’s previous partnerships with organizations like Makerere University and the Uganda Petroleum Institute Kigumba (UPIK), as well as professional associations like the Institute of Surveyors of Uganda (ISU),” DULOUT continued. These programs have already been effective in providing possibilities for young Ugandans to succeed in the oil and gas sector and in onboarding graduate trainees.
All of EACOP’s tier one suppliers and contractors have committed to collaborating with EACOP to enhance knowledge and capacity building among Ugandan instructors, technicians, recent graduates, and professors and lecturers from tertiary and vocational training institutions in order to promote National Content. Two major Capacity Building efforts will be implemented in order to fulfill these objectives, specifically:
- Graduate training programs and internships: These trainees, who will be either current or former students of the institution, will receive training and exposure to work with EACOP’s suppliers and contractors on a variety of project scopes based on their disciplines. Each contractor or supplier has a distinct internship period and location.
- Train the Trainer programs: EACOP’s suppliers and contractors will conduct these training sessions, which aim to exchange knowledge about their diverse project scopes in relation to different engineering disciplines and vocational skills.
Prof. Elly Katunguka, the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Kyambogo University, thanked EACOP for signing the Memorandum of Understanding and emphasized that it will allow Kyambogo University graduates to take advantage of EACOP’s services in technology transfer, capacity building, and exposure to different areas of its operations.
Last year, more than 1,000 engineers graduated from Kyambogo University, one of the biggest engineering schools in the nation. Nonetheless, programs like these, which can employ a large number of our graduates, are essential and greatly valued given the scarcity of employment prospects in the country. The trainer program, which will allow our staff members to obtain training, learn new skills and technologies, and then use these developments to help the students, is equally exciting. Prof. Katunguka stated, “This emphasizes the crucial role of the private sector in forming university curricula—a role we, admittedly, have not fully leveraged in the past.”
In order to facilitate the onboarding of interns with EACOP’s internal departments and graduate trainees with our contractors and suppliers, EACOP has so far inked Memorandums of Understanding with UPIK, Makerere, and professional associations such the Institute of Surveyors of Uganda.
To date, 13 Train the Trainer sessions have been conducted in-person or online by EACOP and its contractors, and 128 graduate trainees in Tanzania and Uganda have benefited from customized trainings, exposure, and on-the-job experience under the graduate training program scheme.
