Graduates and semi‑graduates, if there is one thing we can almost all agree on, besides the quiet horrors of higher education, it is the internship period. You send out letters, approach directors, and even deliver carefully rehearsed praise about the organisation’s ‘vision’ and your eagerness to learn and gain experience. And if you have ever landed an internship, you need no telling how gruelling it can be, especially since, more often than not, interns in Uganda are unpaid.

Not salaries, not stipends, sometimes not even consistent transport refunds. It is a reality that discourages many, as we noted in our Is Studying Nursing Still Worth It? This got me thinking: If companies can recruit interns as unpaid labour, what stops them from using interns instead of hiring employees? Dear reader, some already do.

Recently, a rather quiet “business model” has been making rounds in Uganda’s private sector. So quiet, it does not announce itself boldly, and it rarely appears in glossy annual reports. It operates through job-seeking WhatsApp groups, university noticeboards, and forwarded Google Forms. If you frequent those spaces, you surely have noticed that every few months, a new call goes out: Internship opportunity. Must be hardworking, flexible, and willing to learn. High absorption opportunity…

Three months later, another advert appears. Then another. The faces change, the work continues, but the structure stays the same. One director. Maybe a finance or admin officer. Everyone else rotates.

This is what many young people have come to recognise, sometimes only in hindsight, as the revolving-door internship model: a system where interns are continually recruited to perform core work, quietly replacing the need for salaried staff.

It begs the question: when did internships become labour? Were they always meant to replace employment? For many young people, internships are supposed to be training periods, a bridge between school theory and work. Short, supervised, and structured periods that prepared us for joining the workforce. In practice, however, many interns find themselves doing work that is neither temporary nor educational.

Social media forums and informal discussions reveal the same patterns again and again. Interns managing social media accounts that generate revenue. Interns writing reports submitted to clients. Interns handling customer support, field operations, content production, and even project coordination. Often unsupervised. Often indispensable.

Now don’t get me wrong, if the tasks are relevant to the intern and proper supervision and guidance are provided, there is nothing wrong. The problem arises when the internship ends and the position does not open up. Instead, a new intern arrives.

One might ask how this model is even sustained. The answer is simple: experience is everything. As young people in different fields, we are often advised by peers, parents, lecturers, and even former interns to endure unpaid work for exposure. To accept facilitation instead of wages. To be grateful for access.

And indeed, in Uganda, this advice is understandable. Jobs are few, graduates are many, and turning down an opportunity feels risky, especially when nearly 90% of hiring notices demand at least 3 years’ experience.

Experience has become the new entry fee into employment, and like any fee, those without financial backing struggle to pay it. However, when experience becomes a currency that replaces wages entirely, what was once a steppingstone becomes a holding pattern.

Experience, after all, does not pay rent. It does not buy data. It does not shorten the distance between internship number three and financial independence.

Understandably, internships are usually unpaid, and only paid when clearly labelled as a paid internship. At some point, however, this shifts into exploitation. Listen closely to how internships are described locally, and you will notice a pattern… Payment is rarely called a salary. Instead, it becomes transport refund, airtime, data, lunch, or the all‑purpose word, ‘facilitation.’ Sometimes it is consistent, often it is not, requiring constant begging and reminders.

Many online discussions show interns negotiating not for wages, but for survival. Can they afford transport to work every day? Will they be reimbursed on time? Is the allowance monthly, weekly, or depending on availability?

Framed this way, its exploitation becomes easy to justify. After all, the intern is ‘learning,’ and that doesn’t account for those who must pay to secure the internship, ending up both providing labour and contributing to revenue.

Companies often defend this system with familiar explanations: we are still growing, funding is limited, once things stabilise, we shall hire. These arguments may hold briefly, but when an organisation operates for years, delivers services, serves clients, and runs solely on rotating interns, the claim of temporality sounds stale. A business that cannot exist without labour but refuses to pay for it is not experimenting; it has settled.

It’s important to note that not every unpaid internship is exploitative; in fact, internships are important and serve a purpose. The problem is that someone always finds a loophole to exploit.

An internship crosses the line when interns replace salaried roles, lack structured training or mentorship, output outweighs learning, or ‘absorption’ is promised but never delivered. Then, it stops being a learning opportunity and becomes free labour.

For interns, the cost is personal and immediate: burnout, delayed independence and repeating entry‑level tasks for years under different titles.

Interns fear being labelled difficult, not to mention universities themselves struggling to monitor placements. Labour protections exist on paper, but rarely reach informal workplaces. Society continues to reward endurance over fairness.

Overall, it becomes easier to say, ‘just endure, this is how internships are,’ than to ask, ‘why is this normal?’

Either way, it’s important to note that internships are not the enemy; exploitation disguised as opportunity is. Uganda’s youth are neither lazy nor unwilling to learn; the system is simply stacked against them.

If internships are truly about learning, we need systems that actually teach and guide. If they are about labour, then let us call them what they are: jobs.