In Kampala, Uganda is staking its economic future on a quiet but consequential wager: that remaking vocational education from the ground up — introducing artificial intelligence, specialization, and competency-based learning — can close the distance between what schools produce and what the world of work demands. The ambition is real, and so is the gap it must cross. Trainers who have spent careers in classrooms are now being asked to teach technologies they do not yet fully understand, in institutions that do not yet have the tools to support them. Whether a nation's workforce transforms depe