Emmanuel Angoda

Ocepa Andrew, an S6 student from Lira Town College, won the Research and Technical Paper Presentation category at the 10th National Conference on Communications (NCC 2026) held at Makerere University from the 24th to the 25th of September. What made his win remarkable was not just the prize, but who he was up against, because out of the 26 research papers accepted for presentation at the conference, his paper emerged the best, defeating experienced researchers from Makerere University, Kyambogo University and other institutions. Michelle Abonyo, a lecturer from COCIS, took first runner-up and a Kyambogo lecturer came third. He walked in as a one-man army while others came in groups, and he took home a high-end Lenovo laptop, five million shillings, and a fully paid trip to an international conference sponsored by UCC. His paper was titled Fine-Tuning Neural Machine Translation for Leb Lango: A Low-Resource Approach Using MarianMT. He had collected over fifteen thousand data points, and his work speaks to a larger challenge in artificial intelligence, because many African languages have far fewer digital resources than dominant global languages. Building language technologies around Leb Lango connects digital innovation with preservation, access, and inclusion, which makes it more than just a student project. Ocepa is a big inspiration to me personally. I have been fearing to compete against those with more credentials, yet I had good ideas sitting with me the whole time. Watching him win reminded me that the only thing standing between me and the stage is the decision to show up.