Bridging the Competence Gap in Ugandan Undergraduate Legal Education

Curriculum design and development are critical for ensuring the quality and relevance of higher education.In Uganda, undergraduate legal education continues to rely on noncompetence-based curricula, with each law school or faculty independently designing its own programme, which is then approved by the National Council for Higher Education and the Law Council.The problem is that, despite Uganda's shift to competence-based curricula at the ordinary secondary level, law schools or faculties continue to offer fragmented, theoryoriented programs.As a result, undergraduates possess strong theoretical knowledge but lack essential professional competencies such as advocacy, legal-drafting, ethical-reasoning, problem-solving, client-management, and critical-thinking.Consequently, lawundergraduates are inadequately prepared for contemporary legal practice, limiting the effectiveness of undergraduate-legal-education and Uganda's compliance with the United-Nations-Sustainable-Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) on quality education.The study aims to examine the structure of undergraduate-bachelor of law curricula in Uganda, identify gaps arising from non-competence-based-bachelor of law-curricula, and propose reforms necessary to establish a competence-based-bachelor of law-curriculum aligned with SDG 4. The research questions are: What is the current structure of undergraduate bachelor of law curricula in Ugandan-universities? What gaps arise from non-competence-based bachelor of law-curricula?And what reforms are necessary to establish a competence-based-bachelor of law-curricular aligned with SDG 4? Guided by an interdisciplinary-perspective drawing on educational-theory, sociological-theory, and human-capital-theory, the research is qualitative and doctrinal in nature, employing desktop-review of scholarly articles and reports.Findings indicate that non-competence-based-curricula constrain professional-readiness and underscore the urgent need for a harmonized competence-based-law-curriculum to produce practice-ready-undergraduates.