By Andrew Irumba
The Uganda Communication Commission (UCC) has revealed that going forward, all media houses in Uganda should operate on international standards.
This revelation was made by Irene Kaggwa Sewankambo, the Director Engineering and Communications Infrastructure at the UCC. Sewankambo on Saturday morning held a meeting with the Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardisation Bureau, Dr Chaesub Lee on the 5 floor of the Montbrillant Building to discuss how to operationalise this. Currently, the UCC delegations led by Executive Director Eng. Godfrey Mutabaazi, is in Geneva, Switzerland participating in the ITU Council 2019. Sewankambo congratulated Dr Chaesub upon re-election to the ITU Executive team and committed the continued support of the work of the Standardisation Bureau. She informed him of Uganda’s focus to continue building local capacity in terms of contributions towards the work of ITU Standardisation Sector and also informed of the Commission’s ambition to encourage increased participation of local stakeholders especially academia and industry. On his part, Dr Chaesub applauded Uganda’s commitment and involvement in ITU Standardisation work.
He recognized the contribution and Uganda’s leadership in the African Study Groups; SG2, SG5 and SG13. He reiterated that while capacity building is essential, there is a need to realise a balance between imparting knowledge and being able to use that information by bridging the standardisation gap practically. Uganda has two chairs of the African Study Groups (SG) where Susan Nakanwagi chairs SG 2, Helen Nakiguli chairs SG 5 and Simon Bugaba was the Vice Chair of the SG 13 that was chaired by Dr Chaesub Lee. The two directors also discussed the status and preparations for the World Telecommunications Standardization Assembly (WTSA) 2020. “We are constituting a national preparatory Committee to review with the long-term standardisation goals and to increase the participation of stakeholders, mainly academia and the private sector in the work of ITU,” Sewankambo said. She emphasized that the Commission would like to work closely with the ITU Standardization sector to address issues including; the use of Network Colour Codes (NCC) in border sites; Call location of emergency service; the use of telephone numbers by stakeholders other than operators; Harmonization of essential numbers of social values, such as emergency numbers; E-fraud(Electronic fraud) using E.164 Numbers, IMSI and USSD Codes; SIM Registration challenges and SIM Boxing; Caller ID spoofing and Calling Party Number, among other things.
