Maruf Rosul, a Bangladeshi writer and activist who has received death threats from Islamic militants for his blog posts. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
DHAKA, Sep 29 2016 (IPS)

Like the living room of any proud family, the one in Ajoy Roy’s house boasts photos of the eldest son, Avijit.

A large framed portrait which has a powerful presence in the room hangs on the mint-coloured wall as Ajoy, a retired physics professor who at the age of 80 is frail but still very mentally alert, sits in a chair below it, sipping tea.

It is the image of a popular Bangladeshi writer and bio-engineer, tragically murdered for his beliefs along with scores of other atheist writers, bloggers, publishers, gay activists and religious figures by suspected Islamist militants in the predominantly Muslim country over the past few years.

“Avijit wasn’t an activist on the streets, but he used his pen to protest against social injustice, religious fanaticism and propagate the idea of secularism, the main theme of his writing,” Ajoy, wearing a traditional lungi around his waist, told IPS. “It’s a terrible loss. It cannot be compensated for.”

Ajoy Roy, the father of Bangladeshi writer Avijit Roy, who was murdered in 2015. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

More than 50 writers, activists and others have been killed in Bangladesh since 2013, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Avijit, 42, a U.S. citizen who lived in America with his wife Rafida Ahmed, was hacked to death after the pair went to the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka for a book festival in February 2015.

There have been many more killings since then.

This July, 23 people, including 17 foreigners, were killed at a bakery in the diplomatic zone of Dhaka, in one of the worst terror attacks ever in Bangladesh.

Five of the involved suspects were killed in a police operation at the eatery, while one survivor was arrested and remanded, and another jailed, the Dhaka Tribune later reported.

The suspected ringleader of the attacks and his two affiliates died in a police raid in August, but the search is still on for a coordinator, the arms suppliers and funders of the attacks.

After the murders of two other activists, LGBT campaigners Xulhaz Mannan and Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy, in April, the government, under international pressure over the spate of killings, arrested about 14,000 people.

Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at HRW, said despite no further attacks since the brutal bakery murders, there were “concerns” that the crackdown was leading to “an arbitrary rounding up of usual suspects”.

The drop in incidents meanwhile “suggest that the state could have acted effectively earlier” to prevent the killings, she said.

There was still a “climate of fear” in Bangladesh among writers and members of minority groups, said Ganguly.

“Some have been able to leave the country, but many more, still in Bangladesh, fear that the government will not do enough to protect them,” she said.

Maruf Rosul, 29, a secular writer, photographer, filmmaker and activist who pens for various outlets, including freethinking site Mukto-Mona, set up by Avijit and now being run by his successors, said Islamic extremists in the country had been silenced.

“But the government has not taken the proper action to uproot these evil forces,” Rosul, who said he was on an extremist group’s hit list, but as a “frontier activist” couldn’t go into hiding, told IPS. “I am worried about the future.”

His anxiety was growing ahead of the Durga Puja, the biggest religious festival for south Asia’s Hindu community, which will begin next week, on Oct. 7.

Rosul said “every year” during the festival there were attacks by Islamic extremist groups in Bangladesh, yet officials did nothing but issue “sympathetic statements”.

“As there is no strong law enforcement, we are worried about our Hindu friends,” he told IPS. A Hindu tailor, hacked to death in April, is among those who have been killed in the country.

The sixth edition of Dhaka Literary Festival (DLF) is also due to take place in mid-November. Director Ahsan Akbar told IPS that preparations were in “full-swing”.

“We have had only a couple of cancellations so far, citing security fears, but the encouraging news is our speakers are really looking forward to the event and we expect no more cancellations,” he said.

Given the recent wave of murders though, Akbar said “writers in the country today are unfortunately self-censoring and thinking twice about what they write and publish”.

“Bangladeshi writers outside of the country are deeply sympathetic and doing many things to raise the awareness amongst the international community, such as engaging with PEN International,” he said.

“It is astonishing how we sometimes forget the interconnectivity in of all this: an attack on a writer in Bangladesh is – in a way – an attack on a writer in the West or anywhere else for that matter.”

Olof Blomqvist of Amnesty International told IPS that “the investigations into the targeted killings are ongoing, and there have been arrests made in some of the cases. Genuine justice will of course take time, but it is worrying that the perpetrators have so far only been held to account in one case, the killing of Rajib Haider in 2013.

“The authorities must ensure that those responsible are held to account, but also do more to protect those people at risk,” he said, adding that, “We still get desperate pleas on a weekly basis from people who have received threats and are afraid for their lives if they stay in Bangladesh.”

“Police must create a climate where activists who have been threatened feel safe to approach police and not fear further harassment,” Blomqvist said.

Ganguly also said in order to prevent more attacks, the Bangladeshi authorities needed to deliver a message that they believe in “peaceful free expression”.

“They should not recommend to those at risk that they self-censor to avoid hurting religious sentiment and becoming targets for retribution,” she said.

In 2015, after the killing of writer Niladri Chatterjee Niloy, Bangladesh’s police chief warned bloggers that “hurting religious sentiments is a crime”.

Police killed one of the key suspects involved in Avijit’s murder in June, but two others escaped, they said, and are still at large.

Following his son’s death, Ajoy, who said Avijit had been targeted by extremists in the few weeks before his death, and that he had warned him not to return to Bangladesh, could be forgiven for going into hiding.

But he said he was continuing “my activism” against fundamentalist groups, and had been invited to speak at various institutions.

“I’m not scared,” said Ajoy. “I have lost my son, after that I have nothing to care about.”

Ajoy said he wanted Avijit to be remembered as a “courageous young man who would face any hard situation for democracy, for secularism, for free-thinking”.

It was his wish that “the younger generation follow in his footsteps”.

“I would not discourage these courageous young people to quit blogging, speaking your mind, because Bangladesh is constitutionally a secular, democratic country so we must uphold the constitution,” said Ajoy.

“We have to make the common people understand that this is not an anti-Muslim country, it is liberal,” he said. “Although a large number of Muslims are here, they’re also liberal.”

IPS made several attempts to contact the Bangladeshi police and government for comment, but they did not respond.

Phal Vannak, a farmer from Amlaing commune in Cambodia, who has benefitted from the rehabilitation of a water irrigation scheme by FAO. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPONG SPEU PROVINCE, Sep 26 2016 (IPS)

In Kampong Speu province, when the wet weather doesn’t come, as in other parts of Cambodia, it can affect whether food goes on the dinner table.

“When there’s drought, it strongly affects crop production,” Vann Khen, 48, a married father of three from Amlaing commune, who farms corn for his family’s consumption, and rice, cattle, pigs, chickens and ducks to sell, told IPS.Tens of thousands of households are thought to be affected by drought every year, with "millions" spent saving lives and recovering livelihoods, according to FAO Cambodia.

What has been worsening the situation for farmers in Kampong Speu, some 40 miles west of the country’s capital Phnom Penh and with a population of at least 700,000, was that a 770-metre water canal, made during the reign of dictator Pol Pot, needed urgent restoration, so when it did rain farmers could access water.

In each irrigation scheme, a command area normally allows all farmers access to water. But in many instances lack of maintenance, destruction due to floods or animals, and culverts or other gates not working properly can prevent farmers from accessing water, stress officials with FAO Cambodia.

In other cases, if the irrigation scheme is not built correctly or if there is ineffective land levelling, the water won’t flow. Those not having water access, in both cases, rely mainly on rain patterns. During long dry spells and drought, they suffer more than farmers who have access to irrigation water.

“Last year wasn’t a good harvest, I got only about 500 dollars in total,” Phal Vannak, 28, a married father of three, who mainly farms corn and rice, told IPS.

For corn alone, he earned only about 100 dollars due to the delay in rainfall.

Kampong Speu has been on the other end of extreme weather, suffering from floods and storms.

But the province experienced severe droughts in 1987, 1999, 2000 and the last two years in a row.

“In 2015 and 2016, as in other countries, Cambodia has been hit by El Nino, affecting crop production,” Proyuth Ly, from FAO Cambodia, told IPS.

The dry periods are the “most prominent hazard” threatening the agriculture sector in Kampong Speu, says FAO Cambodia. The industry is one of the sectors most impacted by drought, and smallholder farmers particularly suffer. Tens of thousands of households are thought to be affected by drought every year, with “millions” spent saving lives and recovering livelihoods, according to FAO Cambodia.

Vannak is the president of a Farmer Water User Group (FWUG) for the Kampong Speu irrigation scheme.

There are 500 households from six villages who are members.  To effectively manage water use, they established six sub-committees (one for each village), and a sub-committee of between four to eight people.

“The farmers weren’t happy (last year) because they needed the water to get into the rice field,” said Vannak.

After a request for help from Cambodia’s ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, FAO Cambodia, with funding from the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (DIPECHO), rehabilitated the canal.

“Livelihoods would be affected as they could not grow intended crops,” Etienne Careme, in charge of operations at FAO Cambodia, told IPS. “FAO Cambodia rehabilitated the canal to ensure correct flow of water to needy farmers. It meant rehabilitating canal corridor, strengthening slopes, constructing or rehabilitating culverts.”

The 80,000-dollar, three-month project, completed last December, included setting up software to train farmer water user groups in water management (a figure that doesn’t include staff time and other travel costs).

Today, even though Kampong Speu is still experiencing a dry period, rice grows in lush green fields.

The irrigation scheme is connected from a stream located about 20 miles from the Aoral mountain, the main source, and can supply water to 400 ha of paddy fields.

“This water has really saved this rice crop,” said Ly on a recent field trip to Kampong Speu to monitor the irrigation scheme and the farmer’s needs, trips conducted regularly, as water rushed past him.

Vannak said this season’s harvest was already an improvement on last year.

“When I heard this (canal) was being fixed I was very happy because some people didn’t have water to save their crops,” he said, clutching a handful of corn in a field.

Khen said he was also happier. “We can open or close the water gate,” he said. “Also the small water gate is allowing us to better regulate water and better distribute it to farmers in the commune.”

Careme said the restoration of the irrigation scheme had improved rice yields.

“It allows better production and therefore increases incomes through sale of rice,” he said.

Jovia, who died on Apr. 29, 2016, suffered from both HIV/AIDS and cervical cancer, a deadly combination affecting thousands of women in Uganda. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Uganda, Jul 25 2016 (IPS)

Lying on a dirty bed in a crowded, squalid hostel in Kampala, emaciated Jovia, 29, managed a weak smile as a doctor delivered her a small green bottle containing a liquid.

“I’m so happy they’ve brought the morphine,” the mother told IPS, just about the only words she could get out during what would be the last weeks of her life. “It controls my pain and makes my life more bearable.”“As long as radiotherapy is not available in Uganda many more patients will die.” -- Dr. Anne Merriman

Jovia was suffering from both HIV/AIDS and cervical cancer, a deadly combination affecting thousands of women in Uganda. While the east African country had huge success in the battle against the HIV virus in the 1990s, cervical and other cancers are the new health crises gripping the developing nation. One in 500 Ugandans suffers from cancer. But only five per cent of patients will get any form of treatment, facing an often tortuous death.

Thanks to Hospice Africa Uganda (HAU), founded 23 years ago by the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee, British-born Dr. Anne Merriman, patients like Jovia are given not only affordable pain-controlling oral liquid morphine, but comfort, hope and dignity in their last days.

At 81, Dr. Merriman is credited with introducing palliative care to Africa. HAU has cared for a total of 27,000 seriously ill and dying people since 1993, the vast majority with the morphine made at its Kampala headquarters for just two dollars a bottle, with government funding.

In Uganda, cancer is usually diagnosed quite late, due to poor screening and lack of health services. According to the country’s Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI), 80 per cent of sufferers die because of late diagnosis.

For patients like Jovia, who passed away peacefully on Apr. 29, leaving a daughter, 14, radiotherapy can cure or extend life when treated in early stages.

A tray of morphine at Hospice Africa Uganda. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

But in early April, Uganda’s only radiotherapy machine broke beyond repair. It was used by about 30,000 cancer patients annually. Since then, thousands in need of radiotherapy to cure their cancer, or extend their lives, have been left without vital treatment.

The Ugandan government had purchased a new machine, worth a reported 500,000 dollars, three years ago, but it could not be delivered as special bunkers needed to house the machine had to be built.

Facing an uproar from within Uganda at the lack of radiotherapy services, the government promised a new bunker would be built within six months. Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya, offered free treatment for 400 Ugandan cancer patients. The plan was that they would be sent there by the Ugandan government through the UCI.

But more than three months later there is still huge confusion and contradictory reports and statements about the delivery of this promise, and controversy over the delay in getting desperate patients. Despite repeated requests for clarification the UCI nor Uganda’s ministry of health are able to state exactly how many patients – if indeed any – have yet been sent to Kenya for treatment.

Christine Namulindwa, UCI’s public relations officer, pointed out patients going to Nairobi have to go through an “evaluation”, and be approved by a board.

“So far we’ve submitted 15 names to the ministry of health and more are yet to be submitted,” she said last month. The pledge for free treatment from Aga Khan did not cover the cost of transporting patients and upkeep while in Nairobi, she said.

She said there were “patients who are still waiting” and referred IPS to the health ministry for further questions.

On July 1, Professor Anthony Mbonye, Acting Director General of Health services, told IPS via email the ministry of health had “received a budget for supporting patients to Aga Khan and will provide transport and funds for maintenance”.

A lawyer had “cleared a memorandum of understanding between Aga Khan and UCI,” he said.

“The radiotherapy machine was bought, but the bunker is yet to be rehabilitated. In two months’ time the machine will be installed and services will resume.”

Stories in East African papers in early July reported that the “long wait” was “over” for patients, after Aga Khan signed an MOU with UCI, allowing 400 out of 17,000 patients to “receive treatment”. But they did not give a date for when they would go to Kenya.

Another report said only tumour patients with chances of survival, but including those suffering breast and cervical cancer, would be transported to Kenya using government vans. It said accommodation and other support services were being organised by Uganda’s High Commission in Nairobi, and 20 patients have been approved to go. But again it gave no specific date for their transportation.

Two of seven patients have been treated at Aga Khan not through the UCI and the Ugandan government, but through a partnership with HAU and Road to Care, a programme developed by Canadian doctor Joda Kuk. He set up scheme in 2011 after he witnessed women with cervical cancer in rural areas of Uganda needing desperate assistance to get to Kampala for radiotherapy.

Mary Birungi and Mary Gahoire, a mother of three, both from western Uganda, returned home the week of July 21 after travelling to Kenya by road, being housed by Road to Care and completing radiotherapy treatment there. They are now back with their families.

Two more patients are in the middle of treatment this week and and two more will travel to Kenya. The seventh patient is due to go there in the first week of August.

Dr. Anne Merriman pleaded with the Ugandan government to do all in its power to complete the building of the new bunkers so the new radiotherapy machine can be commissioned as soon as possible.

“We are so happy that under Road to Care seven of our patients will be treated in Kenya, but this is just a drop in the ocean,” she said. “The need is huge. There has been so much confusion since the machine broke down, causing huge stress to patients and families. “

“As long as radiotherapy is not available in Uganda many more patients will die.”

On July 23, Professor Mbyonye told IPS that “some” patients have gone to Kenya and had already come back through the agreement between the health ministry and Aga Khan, but couldn’t give more details.

For many though, it’s too late.

Vesta Kefeza, 49, a mother of seven, has advanced cervical cancer. Lying on a mattress on the ground of her one-room home in Namugongo slum, Kampala, she is immobile, as her leg has ballooned due to a complication from the cancer.

She has been on HAU’s programme since 2011 and is administered morphine by their nurses. Uganda became the first country in the world to allow nurses to prescribe the drug in 2004. The hospice team also provides food and spiritual support.

In June, thanks to a donation from Ireland, Kefeza received a wheelchair, allowing her to get out into the fresh air and go to church.

“Until then I lay in bed all day,” she said. “I thank God for my blessings. I am lucky to have HAU caring for me.”

Women wait to immunize their children at the Kisugu Health Centre in Kampala, Uganda, where free vaccinations take place. The nurse in the foreground is Betty Makakeeto. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Jun 29 2016 (IPS)

Patience*, a Ugandan maid, planned on taking her three-year-old son for polio immunization during the country’s mass campaigns a year ago, until her landlord’s wife told her a shocking myth.

“The medicine they are injecting them with means the boy when he’s an adult won’t be able to reproduce,” Patience, 32, recalled to IPS what she’d been informed. “She said: ‘Don’t even think about immunization’.”

Patience said that in her neighborhood, the Kyebando slum in Kampala, many families “lied to medical personnel” because they were “terrified” about what this woman had told them.

Earlier this year, the country’s president signed the Immunization Act 2016, prescribing fines, a jail term of six months or both, for parents who don’t vaccinate their children in the age bracket of five days to one year old.“They said the vaccines are made out of pigs, wild animals, (that) our children will behave like wild animals.” -- MP Huda Oleru

The Act also requires the production of an immunization card before admission to day care centres, pre-primary or primary education. It also aims to provide for compulsory immunization of women of reproductive age and other target groups against immunisable diseases.

According to the legislation, passed by Parliament last year, diseases for which immunization is compulsory include tuberculosis, whooping cough, tetanus, hepatitis B, polio and measles.

One in five African children still do not receive all of the most basic vaccines they need, including ones for three critical diseases—measles, rubella and neonatal tetanus – a report issued by WHO at the first ministerial on Immunization in Africa, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in February.

Uganda was ranked lowest in east Africa for immunization coverage, with one example being the country’s 2014 diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP3) coverage which was at 78 percent compared to DRC (80 percent) Kenya (81 percent), Tanzania (97 percent) and Rwanda (99 percent).

According to outgoing female MP Huda Oleru, who tabled the private member’s bill in 2011, the biggest obstacle to vaccination in Uganda was the 666 cult made up of more 500 members but “growing” across the country, who refuse to immunize their children.

“They said the vaccines are made out of pigs, wild animals, (that) our children will behave like wild animals,” Oleru told IPS.

Oleru is continuing talks with the groups in eastern Uganda, and said she hoped “in the long-term” they would come around.

But for now the law was the “easiest way” of getting them to immunize their children.

“When I entered Parliament (ten years ago), I realised that we didn’t have an immunisation law, and a law is guidance or directive and it guides us in areas of impunity,” said Oleru.

At least ten members of a Christian group were detained over refusing to vaccinate their children against polio, the Daily Monitor reported last month.

Dr. Henry Luzze, the deputy program manager of the Uganda National Expanded Programme on Immunization, told IPS the government was currently vaccinating against ten diseases. It had submitted an application to GAVI ((the Vaccine Alliance) and received approval to introduce the rotavirus vaccine for diarrhea in children, a “big problem”. They were also looking at introducing a rubella vaccine by 2018 and a second measles vaccination to be given at 18 months.

Measles were still a huge threat, after outbreaks last year in western Uganda, he said.

“We still have some districts and communities that are still below what we want in terms of coverage in the eastern part of the country, areas where there are very high hills and no transport,” said Dr Luze.

Children were also not being vaccinated due to shortages in a number of facilities at a district level, but through recent support from GAVI, Uganda was able to procure solar powered fridges to keep the vaccines in areas prone to power cuts.

The influx of refugees from Burundi, DRC and South Sudan, where immunization rates are low, pose another challenge to Uganda. Late last month at least three cases of yellow fever were confirmed here, with scores of cases suspected.

According to the new Act, “the government shall provide free vaccines and other related services to every Ugandan required to receive vaccination”.

Dr Luzze said the law was good as it was balanced and compels the government to “make sure all the vaccination services are in place”.

“After that, then you commit the parents or the caretakers to make sure all their children are vaccinated,” said Dr Luzze, claiming the legislation “empowers CSOs to challenge the government”, who could be taken to court over shortages.

But there has already been some criticism from Ugandans that the law is too harsh, and during a recent mass polio campaign, held in March, there were reports that about 2,000 children below the age of five missed out on immunizations in Karamoja, northeastern Uganda, according to the country’s Daily Monitor newspaper.

The Act also creates the establishment of an Immunization Fund, house by the ministry of health, to “purchase vaccines and related supplies, cold chains, and funding of immunization outreach activities”.

Sources will be made of up monies appropriate by Parliament for the fund and donations.

“GAVI has been supporting this country so much and they’re still giving, but the challenge is GAVI has its criteria,” said Oleru. “Soon we might become a middle-income country, then we shall not be eligible (for support) under GAVI.”

Luzze said he believed the law would be easy to enforce because “the president, the ministers, the parliamentarians, religious leaders” all supported it.

President Yoweri Museveni was “aggressive” about promoting immunization because he believes it saves “families from spending too much money and time caring for sick members”, among other reasons, said his spokesperson Lindah Nabusayi.

Dr Moses Byaruhanga, the director of medical and health services for Uganda’s police, told IPS the authorities would go on radio talk shows to talk about the law, but would be strict on it.

“Police will be able to find out if (parents) did not take their kids for immunization,” he said, adding health workers, local leaders and schools would be the eyes and ears of the community.

International immunization experts such as Mike McQuestion, director of sustainable immunization financing at Sabin Vaccine Institute in the US, have praised the new legislation as a “textbook example of good governance”.

“The way the Ugandans created this law was itself impressive,” he told IPS. “Several public institutions had to work together to write it, vet it and push it through.”

In late March, about two weeks after it emerged the law had passed, Patience had her son immunized against polio, during a door-to-door mass campaign.

“It was very easy, they just put a drop in the mouth, then a mark on the finger,” she said, adding it took only three minutes.

Patience admitted she had been “partly” worried about going to jail under the new law, and that was the reason she’d chosen to vaccinate her son. But she said the nurse had told her “you shouldn’t not vaccinate him because you’ll be arrested, but because he can get sick”.

“I think now he is free from becoming sick,” said Patience.

*Patience’s name was changed for personal reasons.

Children in the Internationnal Rescue Committee Kindergarden in Hamadiya. Credit: UN Photo/Fred Noy/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Uganda, Feb 16 2016 (IPS)

After escaping the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region during which his father and two brothers were killed and his mother and sister displaced, Adam (named changed), began a new chapter. But it was a life “in limbo”. Over a decade later, he remains trapped in a strange country where he struggles to prove his identity; cannot find work or receive financial support.

“An egg and a stone cannot fight,” said Adam, quoting an African proverb, adding that “as a refugee or a stateless person you don’t have the power to resist the authorities.” The Darfuri is one of the many “refugees in orbit” created by the “flaws” in Israel’s “voluntary” return procedure, as NGOs have labeled them.

About 3,000 Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers have left Israel over the past two years, not to their country of origin, but under a deal shrouded in secrecy for Uganda and Rwanda. These countries cannot guarantee their rights or safety and leaves them further “wandering in search of protection”, stated the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants (HRM), which has released several reports on the issue.

A spokesperson for the Rwandan government did not reply to queries from IPS, but last week a newspaper reported the foreign affairs minister saying the country, along with “a number of other countries”, were approached by Israel “about two or one and a half years ago”, but a deal was yet to be finalised with Rwanda. There are still flights from Israel to Kigali three times a week, according to HRM.

But the government of neighbouring Uganda continues to deny that any agreement exists, despite more asylum seekers leaving the Middle East on a flight to Uganda last July, according to the Israeli-based NGO. A deal between Israel and Uganda was said to include Israeli arms, military expertise and training, a senior Israeli official said, according to a 2013 report by website Ynetnews.

Uganda’s state minister for refugees, Musa Ecweru, and foreign ministry spokesperson Sam Omara stated they were not aware of an arrangement which has left many refugees stranded in the country.

According to a source in UNHCR Uganda, “We know of seven asylum seekers that have sought asylum in Uganda, having been relocated from Israel.” They said the government had “long been categorical that there is no agreement with Israel for such relocations”. But these cases were before the Inter-Ministerial Refugee Eligibility Committee for “determination”, they added.

Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon told IPS, “We do not comment on the issue”.

Relations between Israel and Uganda are said to have strengthened, with areas of bilateral co-operation now including agriculture, health and homeland security.

Darfur has been mired in violence since 2003 when ethnic insurgents rebelled against Khartoum’s Arab- dominated government, complaining of their marginalisation.

Adam’s last memories before he fled his home as a 15-year-old student were of being beaten, his village burning, military aircraft hovering above and “everybody running”. “They didn’t know where they were going,” the 28-year-old, who has deep-set eyes and sounds distinct from the others in a café in downtown Kampala, told IPS.

After two years in Egypt, Adam went to Israel in 2008, spending time in a refugee camp, before living in the community, volunteering for NGOs as a refugees’ rights activist. In May 2014, the interior ministry refused to renew his visa. Instead, they offered Adam a grim choice: return to Darfur, or go to Holot, a detention facility also in southern Israel. “These two hells, I cannot face them’,” said Adam, adding that after surviving genocide, Holot could have meant “the end of my life”.

Adam was surprised and confused when officials told him he would be going the next day to Uganda, a country where he knew no one. He told them “if you want me to leave okay, but you have to guarantee that where I’m going there’s safety and protection.” “They didn’t reply,” he claimed.

With Israeli travel documents and $1,000, he was escorted by police onto a plane carrying three other African asylum seekers, one of them handcuffed after he tried to resist deportation, said Adam. Their papers were confiscated when they arrived at Uganda’s Entebbe airport.

“It’s human trafficking,” Adam emphasised. During his first two days in Uganda, he stayed in a Kampala hotel, allegedly paid for by Israel. But on the third day, once he’d left the lodge, the refugee was arrested and asked to show police identification. Adam couldn’t provide documentation.

“I told them what had happened but they didn’t believe me, because it’s unbelievable to meet someone who has come from Israel without documents,” he said.

He went with other deportees from Israel to request refugee status and a three-month residency permit to use as identification, a difficult process without a Ugandan entry permit. “We said we don’t have any papers. The authorities said ‘we cannot handle a case like this’, said Adam.

He was later given documents and is hoping to get a Ugandan identification card soon, but to get papers allowing him to travel or be resettled, said he would need a recommendation from someone. He wonders if he will ever get a passport.

Today, Adam lives in Kampala with Jamba (name changed), another Darfuri asylum seeker who was sent to Holot after Israeli authorities refused to renew his visa in May 2015, before deporting him to Uganda with a few others. “I don’t normally leave home because I don’t have any documents,” Jamba told IPS, adding he is jobless. He would like to study, but having no documents means the 28-year-old can’t. Through some financial support from friends in Israel, Adam is now studying in Kampala.

“But how long are they going to support you, because they’re also in limbo,” he said.

Adam and Jamba are ambivalent about going home as Israel’s “voluntary” return process doesn’t guarantee that Uganda won’t deport them back to Darfur. At least 300,000 people have died in the conflict there and more than two million displaced, according to the UN, but Khartoum estimates the number is 10,000. If they ever do return, they may be treated as an “enemy” by authorities after living in Israel, who they both partly blame for some of their uncertainty.

“You cannot just take people, dump them in Uganda and then take documents from them…without taking care of them,” said Adam. But he argued, “you need to look at the root cause of the problem and the root cause is the Sudanese government, who started attacking their own”.

According to a December 2015 report by HRM, many Eritrean deportees sent to Rwanda illegally crossed the border to Uganda by force, while some have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach Europe, others were detained in Libya and some have been murdered by ISIS.

HRM spokesperson Anat Ovadia-Rosner said the “categorical denial” of the Ugandan government over the scheme was “very alarming and illustrates the disparity between Israel’s assurances and the reality on the ground”.

In November 2015, an Israeli court rejected a petition arguing that those who depart for a third country are at risk of threat or persecution. The Refugee Rights Legal Clinic at Tel Aviv University, HRM and other NGOs have further petitioned the court, with another hearing scheduled for March 15.

(End)

Ugandan journalist Andrew Lwanga, who is still recovering more than one year after allegedly being battered by a police commander while covering a protest. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Uganda, Feb 5 2016 (IPS)

On October 2015, the day that Ugandan journalist Enoch Matovu, 25, was allegedly shot by the police for simply “doing my job”, the police had “run out of tear gas”, he claimed.

“So they had to use live bullets,” this journalist for broadcaster NTV Uganda told IPS. Matovu was injured in the head while covering the apparent vote rigging by contestants during the ruling party’s — National Resistance Movement (NRM) — elections in Mityana, central Uganda. “I only realised when I woke up in hospital what had happened,” he added.

Shockingly, since party elections in October, over 40 Ugandan journalists have been detained, beaten, had their tools and material taken, blocked from covering events and have lost employment, according to Robert Sempala, the National Coordinator for Human Rights Network for Journalists (HRNJ) Uganda. Two other journalists besides Matovu have allegedly been shot by the police.

Ahead of the February 18 elections, in which President Yoweri Museveni, 71, and already in power for 30 years, is standing, there’s a “likelihood” the press crackdown “is going to get worse”, said Sempala. “The contest is neck-to-neck,” he told IPS, adding there was “stiff competition” from the three-time presidential challenger Kizza Besigye and former Prime Minister, Amama Mbabazi. “According to our statistics, most of the victims have been those that cover either Besigye or Mbabazi, as opposed to the rest of the contestants,” he emphasised.

On January 20, Endigyito FM, a privately owned radio station in Mbarara, about 170 miles outside the capital Kampala, was shut down, purportedly over unpaid licence fees of $11,000. Mbabazi’s campaign team claimed that an interview with him two days earlier had been disrupted 20 minutes into the show, after officials from the Uganda Communications Commission stormed the building. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and others have called for the broadcaster to be allowed to resume operations.

In a January report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned of a media clampdown, saying radio reporters working in local dialects with an audience in rural areas particularly faced intimidation and threats from government. “Looking over the last decade, its clear that violations of press freedom have clearly increased during elections and also during times of political tension in Kampala,” Maria Burnett, HRW senior researcher for Africa, told IPS.

“For journalists working outside Kampala, in local languages, my sense is that media freedom has been very difficult during political campaigns and elections in recent times,” she added. Burnett said in terms of what is happening outside Kampala, HRW’s research indicated that “the patterns are fairly similar” to the 2011 elections: “Perhaps the only real difference is that some radio journalists are more able to state the pressure they are under and the problems they face, either via social media or other media platforms as the Kampala-based media houses expand coverage country-wide.”

Sempala said “on the whole” there were more cases of violations against the press outside Kampala, according to HRNJ’s statistics. Most journalists attacked anywhere in Uganda claim it is hard to get justice. “Each morning I wonder what to do,” said Andrew Lwanga, 28, a cameraman with local WBS station, who was assaulted last year by the then Kampala district police commander Joram Mwesigye, leaving him with horrific injuries and unable to work. His equipment was also damaged.

“I loved covering the election so much. I would love to be out there,” he added. He is now fund-raising for a spinal operation in Spain — Ugandan doctors told him he had no option but to go abroad – and spends his days sitting in a lounge, watching his colleagues on the TV doing what he most wants to be doing.

Lwanga, a journalist of eight years, was injured while covering a small demonstration involving a group called the Unemployed Youths of Uganda in January 2015. Online, there is footage of Mwesigye assaulting Lwanga, of the cameraman falling down and then being led away by police, holding his head and crying in pain. “Now I can’t walk 50 metres without crutches,” said Lwanga, who has a visible scar on one side of his head and a bandage on one hand. “For the past 90 days I haven’t been able to sleep more than 40 minutes… All of this makes me cry,” he added.

More than a year after the assault, Lwanga’s case is dragging on. Mwesigye has been charged with three counts including assault and occasioning bodily harm, and suspended from his role. But at the last hearing, when Lwanga had to be carried into court by two others, it was revealed that the journalist’s damaged camera – an important exhibit – had disappeared and still hasn’t been found. “(The police) are trying to protect Joram, he wants to retain his job and he (has) always confronted me saying ‘you’re putting me out of work’,” said the cameraman.

Recently, Museveni pledged to financially help this journalist. But Lwanga said he hadn’t received any communication as yet when the money was coming. The last state witness in the trial was due to be heard on February 4 but has been adjourned to the 29th. Despite his ordeal, if he eventually has the operation and recovers, Lwanga said he will get back to work: “I miss my profession”.

Matovu is back at work, but still suffers a lot of headaches after his alleged attack, and admitted “sometimes I’m scared to do my job” “The police are not doing anything about this, only my bosses,” he said of his case.

Sempala said so far HRNJ had only managed to take “a few” cases involving journalists being assaulted to court. More advocacy is required to put pressure on police to investigate cases, he said. Burnett said it was “important that journalists who are physically attacked by police share their stories and push for justice”.

Police spokesperson Fred Enanga told IPS that Lwanga’s case was an “isolated” one, but the fact that police had “managed” to charge Mwesigye was “one very good example” that the authorities did not take human rights breaches against journalists lightly. “Over the years there’s been this very good working relationship with the media,” insisted Enanga.

(End)

Majidah Nantanda is Uganda’s first female national coach for the country’s women’s football team. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Aug 23 2014 (IPS)

Growing up with five brothers, soccer-mad Majidah Nantanda had half a team to compete against at home in Makindye, a suburb in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. But at her school, in the 1990s, there were two sports rules: “Netball for the girls and football for the boys,” recalls the 32-year-old, as she stands on the sidelines of a boy’s game in Makindye.

“So I’d sneak out of netball to watch the boys play.”

From the age of eight, her brothers realised they had some fierce competition so they introduced her to the neighbourhood boys, who Nantanda would play with during her holidays.

“My mum never told me you’re not supposed to play football,” Nantanda tells IPS, adding her single mother, a businesswoman, bought her a kit and later gave her transport money to go to games.

Despite only getting a chance to perfect her talent in her spare time, it didn’t stop the Ugandan from captaining the first national women’s football team before becoming the first female national coach in 2007.

The country’s sports fans have been encouraged recently by Ugandan Stephen Kiprotich picking up gold in the men’s marathon in the London 2012 Olympics, and countryman Moses Kipsiro winning the 10,000m at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow earlier this month.

But “there is no sport that promotes Uganda more than football”, Federation of Uganda Football Association (FUFA) spokesperson Ahmed Hussein insists.

“Even if people go and win medals at international level [in other sports], nothing beats football,” Hussein tells IPS.

Nantanda says women playing football in Uganda has become more accepted over the past 15 years.

Today in this East African country there are at least 64 girls’ schools competing in the annual national secondary girls football championships, and many other women who aspire to be the next Nantanda.

This month, in fact, a team of 18 female footballers from Uganda could have travelled to Canada to participate in the FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup.

“They would have been so happy. For most of them it would have been their first time on a plane, and for all of them, the first time in North America,” says Nantanda, who would have made the journey with them as coach.

But instead of being cheered on by their country some 5,000km away in Ghana, the ladies, aged between 16 and 20 years, are getting on with their lives after having their hopes dashed at the last minute by a governing body that hasn’t grasped the potential of Uganda’s female football players, says Nantanda.

Nantanda says just three days before the match in Ghana, FUFA announced on radio that they had withdrawn the team, citing a lack of funds.

“Women’s football is not a priority for the nation,” says the coach.

“We are not catered for like the men’s national team.”

She adds: “The Cranes [the men’s national team] are paid a lot of money but women, they don’t take us seriously.”

A total of 25 aspiring sports stars, coached by Nantanda, trained for months while also studying at school or university and while holding down part-time jobs.

Last September, the women beat neighbouring South Sudan 13-0 on home soil in Kampala.

In defence, Hussein says Uganda is the only country among FIFA’s 209 members that doesn’t have an annual designated budget from the government. He stresses that although the government is “passionate” about the game, often approaching with support, the money they give isn’t enough.

FUFA are funded by local corporations such as Airtel, NIC and Nile Breweries, ticket sales and FIFA development grants.

The United Nations have stressed the potential contribution that sport can make towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), stressing it is about participation, inclusion and citizenship, and a certain percentage of FUFA grants must be spent on women’s football along with youth soccer and refereeing.

In 2004, Uganda’s football association was warned by FIFA that if they continued to use their yearly grant for the national team they risked losing it. In the past, FUFA have also denied corruption claims.

Nantanda sympathises with the girls. After all she has had her struggles.

“Not everyone’s happy that I’m a national coach,” she says, adding most soccer coaches in Uganda are male.

“A woman doing something different will straight away be attacked by men.

She adds: “If you’re not [emotionally] strong enough you’ll just give up.”

But that’s something Nantanda has never done, even when she’s been the only female alongside 60 men at an elite coaching session.

“I interact with these men and I do everything they do,” she says.

As one of only a few female FIFA-recognised referees in Uganda, Irene Namubiru, 34, has also smashed her own goals.

“[Women] enjoy playing football,” Namubiru tells IPS. “But they fear officiating because of the abuses, the insults from the fans, so they hold back.”

Nantanda doesn’t know when the under 20s team will play next.

Many women have stopped training and forgotten about football altogether.

Hussein says their Ghana match coincided with the men’s senior team travelling to South Africa for the African Nations Championship finals. Both competitions would have cost the federation “well over” 400 million shillings (153,552 dollars).

“People believe that the national senior team should be given a lot of precedence, as opposed to the women’s team or even to junior teams,” says Hussein.

“But we’re looking at entering the women’s team in future international tournaments.”

He says there could be a pilot project in the next couple of years in Uganda to form a women’s national football league.

“We believe that if the women’s team is properly handled they can get their own funding from different companies, the corporate world could come in and support them,” he says.

Nantanda still speaks to her under 20s and encourages them to train. But the coach, who admits she does mostly “volunteer work”, says she is putting more of her effort into “grassroots development”, encouraging girls in villages across Uganda to take up football through her charity Growing the Game for Girls.

Through Tackle Africa, Nantanda she is also getting rural communities hooked on football to teach them about HIV prevention and management.

There’s one piece of advice she gives all women, regardless of whether they have an upcoming tournament.

“Continue with your studies,” she reiterates.

“You won’t get paid through football.

“It’s not only about playing for the national team. I want these girls to be better women in the future and not waste their education.”

Edited by: Nalisha Adams

The writer can be contacted on Twitter @amyfallon 

Uganda has been hailed as a success story in fighting HIV/AIDS, with prevalence rates dropping from 18 percent in 1992 to 6.4 percent in 2005. But activists fear a new HIV Bill will lead to lead to people shunning testing and treatment. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Aug 21 2014 (IPS)

HIV/AIDS activists are adamant Uganda will not achieve an “AIDS-free generation” now a “backwards” HIV/AIDS Bill criminalising the “wilful and intentional” transmission of the disease has been signed into law.

The act, they say, will lead to people shunning testing and treatment, but will particularly drive sex workers and gay men underground, and make women more vulnerable to domestic violence.

News that the controversial law, adopted unanimously by Parliament on May 13, and assented to by Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni on Jul 31, broke on social media only this week on Aug. 19.

The bill also allows medical providers to disclose a patient’s HIV status to others without consent and prescribes mandatory testing for pregnant women, their partners, and victims of sexual offences.

Uganda has been hailed as a success story in fighting HIV/AIDS, with prevalence rates dropping from 18 percent in 1992 to 6.4 percent in 2005.

But Museveni went against earlier promises to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) executive director and campaigners that he wouldn’t back the punitive law.

“This is a populist act,” Kikonyongo Kivumbi of the Uganda Health and Science Press Association (UHSPA-Uganda) told IPS.

“He knows what he’s doing is not the right thing in addressing the general public health concerns in this country.”

Kivumbi pointed out that according to the 2014 UNAIDS Global Progress report, Uganda was now the third country in the world contributing to sustaining the pandemic.

Other campaigners are “heartbroken” and “outraged” after the president approved the HIV Prevention and Control Bill.

The news broke as CSOs were still waiting for an audience with Museveni over the controversial bill, which has been slammed by Uganda’s own AIDS Commission and the AIDS Control programme of the Ministry of Health (MoH).

“Some bad news from Uganda. Please pray for us,” Jacquelyne Alesi, director or programmes at Uganda Network of Young People Living with HIV & AIDS (UNYPA), said in an email to IPS.

The legislation prescribes a maximum 10 years in jail, a fine of about five million Ugandan shillings (1,980 dollars) or both for anyone who “willfully and intentionally transmitting HIV/AIDS to another person”.

Another provision of the law, drafted in 2008, provides for a fine or a maximum five years in jail for those convicted of “attempted transmission”.

According to the 2011 Uganda AIDS Indicator Survey, overall HIV prevalence is higher among women (8.3 percent) than among men (6.1 percent).

“Usually HIV bears the face of a woman,” Dorcas Amoding, policy, advocacy and networking officer for Action Group for Health Human Rights and HIV/AIDS (AGHA-U), told IPS.

“So if she has tested positive and perhaps the husband becomes aware of it…he might treat this as a very negative result as well and she can be attacked.”

Amoding added, “it even brings about a very huge burden in terms of women inheriting property, because some people still think HIV is a death sentence.”

“So if I say ‘I want to have my husband’s property for the children’, people are going to say ‘you’ll die tomorrow, you’re HIV positive.’”

Most LGBT people with HIV/AIDS already “die silently” and many were no longer going for services in the after the passing of the Anti-Homosexual Act, Bernard Ssembatya, from Vinacef Uganda, a sexual health and reproductive NGO focusing on HIV, told IPS. The anti-gay law was, however, declared “null and void” by the constitutional court on a legality earlier this month.

“Some of them are wary of going to health services, some health providers are also scared of delivering services,” Ssembatya said.

There will be “an increase in deaths from HIV, more infections” as a result of the HIV/AIDS law, he warned.

According to AIDS Free World, over 60 countries criminalise the transmission of HIV or the failure to disclose one’s HIV status to sex partners, or both. Global Commission on HIV and the Law members have highlighted Guinea, Senegal and Togo, which they say in recent years have revised existing, or adopted new laws which limit HIV transmission to exceptional cases of wilful transmission.

Guyana also rejected a criminalisation law. In the U.S, 34 states still have HIV specific criminal statutes, however, in May Iowa approved a law revising a HIV specific statute.

Kivumbi pointed out that criminalisation was an “agenda of the U.S. republican right”, who he accused of influencing political and public health appointments in Uganda.

“We need to tell U.S. republican extremists and evangelical Christians to leave managing the HIV pandemic to ourselves,” he said.

“Just because the U.S. gives us money it does not mean [they] can impose their extremist agenda on us.”

Uganda had deliberately chosen to “moralise the pandemic and response, emphasising abstinence at the expense of condom use and other scientifically proven interventions,” Kivumbi said.

“We have had cabinet ministers, parliamentarians and other people at senior government level saying that people who are HIV positive are morally bankrupt,” the activist said.

Kivumbi said there was an “element of politicking” on Museveni’s part in inking his signature on the bill. Uganda will be submitting a “concept note” to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria on Oct. 15, and wanted to get access to a 90-million-dollar loan from the World Bank that was suspended, he said.

One clause of the HIV/AIDS Bill seeks to set up an AIDS Trust Fund managed by the MoH, with money coming from foreign governments and international agencies, among other means.

Ironically, that loan was put on hold in February, just days after the president approved the Anti-Homosexuality Act.

“I think that the president thought that by signing this law, which [sets up] the AIDS Trust Fund, the World Bank would give him money and the Global Fund would contribute,” said Kivumbi.

“Let the Global Fund and the World Bank not be fooled.

”This law tramples upon basic civil liberties and cannot be acceptable in a free and democratic society that Uganda aspires to be.”

Dianah Nanjeho, a communications consultant at Uganda Network on Law, Ethics and HIV/AIDS (UGANET), which works with a coalition of 40 organisations, told IPS the activists wanted the contentious clauses in the bill to be amended.

“The act in itself is a good act we don’t condemn it, we just want those one, two three things sorted out.”

She said the positive parts of the law were state obligations to provide care and treatment and the establishment of the AIDS Trust Fund.

Nanjeho said CSOs, who are still hoping to meet Museveni, hadn’t ruled out challenging the law in court, and would make a decision on this in the next few days.

“For now we are all weighing all options,” she said.

Edited by: Nalisha Adams

The writer can be contacted on Twitter @amyfallon 

Contraception is a smart choice but HIV positive women have to jump through the hooks to get it. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Aug 18 2014 (IPS)

Barbara Kemigisa used to call herself an “HIV/AIDS campaigner”. These days she would rather be known as an “HIV/AIDS family planning campaigner”.

“We need to reduce unplanned pregnancies and the HIV infection rate in our country,” Kemigisa told IPS during Uganda’s first national family planning conference on July 28. “It’s about dual protection.”

Raped by two uncles from an early age, Kemigisa later became promiscuous. When she was 22, she discovered she was HIV positive – and two months pregnant. Her daughter, Kourtney, now five, was born negative. But the mother couldn’t afford to buy her formula milk and, when she was just six-months-old, the baby tested positive, through breastfeeding.

Kemigisa, an informed activist who gets her ARVs the Infectious Diseases Institute at Mulago Hospital and works with KiBO Foundation in Kampala,never had any problem obtaining contraceptives.

The same can’t be said for many young HIV positive women Kemigisa regularly meets.

“Health workers tell them ‘you’re positive, you’re not supposed to be having children’,” she says.

In the last decade, Uganda’s modern contraceptive use among women has slowly increased from 18 percent to 26 percent.

Though low, this level of contraceptive use likely averted 20 percent of paediatric HIV infections and 13 percent of AIDS-related children’s deaths, says a study. Expanding family planning services can substantially reduce child infections, it concluded.

This is crucial. Uganda’s HIV infection rate of seven percent is steadily rising after a steep drop in the 1990s, when more than a quarter of the population was infected.

Uganda now accounts for the third largest number of annual new HIV infections in the world, after South Africa and Nigeria, according to the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

Turning women away

Contraception is the second pillar of preventing mother to child HIV transmission (PMTCT) but one that is often neglected although, at an average of six children per woman, Uganda has one of the world’s highest fertility rates.

Women trying to cope with HIV also struggle to get the “right and correct information” on family planning, says Dorothy Namutamba, of the International Community of Women living with HIV/AIDS Eastern Africa (ICWEA).

“Information doesn’t reach women living with HIV in their reproductive age,” she says.

Women may face violence at home for being HIV positive and for using contraception, only to be further mistreated when they turn to health workers, says Namutamba.

“Some are told ‘oh, this is best for you’ and brushed off at the health facility,” says Namutamba.

In the worst-case scenarios, some HIV positive women have undergone coerced sterilisation.

Namutamba says this may happen when the woman has a caesarean section or goes for family planning services: “They’re told that this is the best for you as a HIV positive woman.”

In Kenya, ICWEA and other groups have documented about fifty cases of coerced sterilisation and will release later this year a report about similar cases in Uganda.

Because of discriminatory attitudes, “a large percentage of women are hesitant to share their status with health workers when they come to receive family planning services,” Dr Deepmala Mahla, country director for Marie Stopes Uganda, told IPS.

Two services, one trip

Inadequate coverage, frequent stock outs of commodities, limited offer of contraceptive methods and lack of trained staff affect family planning services for all women in Uganda, says Dr Primo Madra, programme officer with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Kampala.

But for women living with HIV, he says, the main problem is the time and effort required.

An HIV positive woman who goes to the clinic for a refill of ARV pills must line up at the HIV clinic and then at the family planning clinic, both likely with long queues. She may have to do two trips.

“Most often the woman will prioritise the ARVs,” says Madra.

In a number of districts, the government and UNFPA are setting up “one-stop-shops” that offer both HIV and reproductive health services, and training health workers in the new system.

“This will enable a woman who walks into an ARV clinic to access all services more conveniently,” Primo told IPS.

But, he adds, the nationwide rollout of one-stop-shops is constrained by lack of staff: “Many health facilities have vacant health worker positions and are overwhelmed by the patient load.”

Edited by: Mercedes Sayagues

Excerpt:

Students from Great Horizon Secondary School in Uganda's rural Kyakayege village pose proudly with their re-usable menstrual pads after a reproductive health presentation at their school. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Aug 15 2014 (IPS)

When Peninah Mamayi got her period last January, she was scared, confused and embarrassed. But like thousands of other girls in the developing world who experience menarche having no idea what menstruation is, Mamayi, who lives with her sister-in-law in a village in Tororo, eastern Uganda, kept quiet.

“When I went to the toilet I had blood on my knickers,” she told IPS. “I was wondering what was coming out and I was so scared I ran inside the house and stayed there crying.

“I just used rags. I feared telling anybody.”For girls, “pads are as good as schoolbooks” -- Dennis Ntale, 18, a student at co-ed Mengo Senior School in Kampala, Uganda

Not having access to or being able to afford disposable sanitary pads or tampons like millions of their Western counterparts, desperate Ugandan girls will resort to using the local ebikokooma leaves, paper, old clothes and other materials as substitutes or even, as a health minister told a menstrual hygiene management conference this week, sitting in the sand until that time of the month is over.

“We always try to give them something to use at school, just at school,” Lydia Nabazzine, a teacher at Mulago Private Primary School in Kampala, where about 300 out of 500 students are female, told IPS.

“When they go home we don’t know how they go about it, because we cannot afford funding up to home level.”

But the 2012 Study on menstrual management in Uganda, conducted by the Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV) and IRC International Wash and Sanitation Centre in seven Ugandan districts, found that over 50 percent of senior female teachers confirmed there was no provision for menstrual pads for schoolgirls.

When some girls have their period, they may miss up to 20 percent of their total school year due to the humiliation of not having protection, according to separate research from the World Bank. This profoundly affects their academic potential.

“Those days when I was menstruating I could be absent for up to five days a month until menstruation had stopped,” recalled Mayami.

It’s a continent-wide problem. The United Nations Children’s Fund says one in 10 African girls skipped school during menstruation. Some drop out entirely because they lack access to effective sanitary products.

A number of recent initiatives have, however, tried to address this.

On May 28 this year, the world marked the first Menstrual Hygiene Day to help “break the silence and build awareness about the fundamental role that good menstrual hygiene management (MHM) plays in enabling women and girls to reach their full potential.”

On Aug. 14 – 15, East Africa’s first national menstrual hygiene management conference, which has the theme “breaking the silence on menstruation, keep girls in school,” has been taking place in Uganda’s capital Kampala.

At least 100 schoolteachers, schoolgirls – and boys – NGOs, including Network for Water and Sanitation (NETWAS) Uganda, civil society members and others are taking part in the two-day event. They’re calling on the government to put in place a menstrual hygiene management school policy. They also want the government to provide free sanitary pads to girls in schools, like neighbouring Kenya has done.

Despite keeping silent about the horrors of menstruation for months, Mamayi shared with the conference attendees the solution she found to that time of the month.

The student, now 13, had been walking home from school when some older pupils told her, “madam [the teacher] said menstruation is a normal thing for every girl.”

“So I asked them about it,” she told IPS.

“Now I’m using AFRIPads.”

Invented by the eponymous Uganda-based social business, AFRIPads are washable cloth sanitary towels designed to provide effective and hygienic menstrual protection for up to a year.

Mamayi said the re-useable pads work out to be 5,500 Ugandan shillings (2.11 dollars) a year, compared to the 30,000 shillings (11.49 dollars) that disposable pads would have set her back.

“Now when I go somewhere [when I have my period] I sit and am comfortable,” said Mamayi. “I’m not bothered by anything. I don’t worry whether I’ve got anything on my skirt. I don’t miss school.”

She added: “I’m going to tell my friends that menstruation is a normal thing in girls.

“I want my friend also to be free, to tell their parents to buy for them pads. Let them not fear.”

Understanding and Managing Menstruation, was launched by Uganda’s Ministry of Education and Sports at East Africa’s first national menstrual hygiene management conference. The 50-page reader has photos and a section on how to make reusable pads at home, and sections for parents, guardians, peers, friends and schoolboys. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

Breaking the culture of silence around menstruation is the aim of a new book, Understanding and Managing Menstruation, launched by Uganda’s Ministry of Education and Sports at the conference. The 50-page reader has photos and a section on how to make reusable pads at home, and sections for parents, guardians, peers, friends and schoolboys.

Maggie Kasiko, a gender technical advisor at the Ministry of Education and Sports, told IPS that the government hoped the book would reach as many students, teachers and parents across the country as possible.

“Not many girls have the opportunities to have their mothers and aunties around, so they start their menstruation without knowing,” she said, adding many parents and relatives were busy trying to earn a living for their families.

Dennis Ntale, 18, a senior five student at co-ed Mengo Senior School in Kampala, said he didn’t know what menstruation was when he encountered a fellow student with her period in class earlier this year, and tried to comfort her. It was only sometime later when he relayed the incident to his male friends and they told him she was “undergoing her MP [menstrual period].”

“They’re [teachers] not teaching this to the boys in schools,” Ntale told IPS.

“I believe boys should be informed about this because there are many of them out there who have no idea about this.”

He said for girls, “pads are as good as schoolbooks”.

“If you don’t have that pad she won’t be able to do a thing,” Ntale said. “[We should] make sure she has what will keep her in school.”

Kasiko said the Ministry of Education and Sports was continuing to ensure schools had separate facilities for boys and girls, with the girls having washrooms and changing rooms where they could bathe and change, had access to clean water, extra pads and Panadol.

But she said she didn’t see the government providing free pads to girls “in the short-term or the long-term”.

“Starting to distribute sanitary towels to each and every girl, every month, is quite a cost for the ministry when you look at all the other areas that the ministry needs to take care of,” she said.

“That, our guidelines for Universal Primary Education (UPE) is very clear, is a role of parents. It’s sanitary wear. Just like you buy a panty for your child, you should be responsible for buying a sanitary towel for your child.

Kasiko added: “But we’ll support the parents and work together with the parents to give them knowledge to ensure the environment is clean and girls stay in school.”

Edited by: Nalisha Adams

The writer can be contacted on Twitter @amyfallon 

Students from Kisule Primary School in Kampala at the International Children’s Climate Change Conference (ICCCC), July 2014, Uganda. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Jul 15 2014 (IPS)

Olga Mugisa, 11-years-old, takes to the microphone in front of her peers, the Ugandan flag proudly draped behind her and green plants framing the stage. She has an important message to share with her fellow students: “If you cut one, plant two.”

“I tell all of you here you to plant trees at school, at home, everywhere,” she says in a loud and confident voice to participants at Africa’s first International Children’s Climate Change Conference held in the Ugandan capital at the weekend.

“If you plant those trees you will get air that you breathe in and (you) will breathe in oxygen as you produce carbon dioxide,” adds the Primary 5 student at Mirembe Junior, an international school in Namuwongo, traditionally a slum area of Kampala.“Children are the future generation, but at the moment we are in this climate change quagmire because adults cut trees with impunity. We do not think twice … we didn’t plant them” – Joseph Masembe, founder of Uganda’s Little Green Hands

Joining forces with Uganda’s National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), Uganda’s Little Green Hands NGO organised the International Children’s Climate Change Conference, which brought together about 280 “child delegates”, aged between five and 12, from 23 schools in four Ugandan districts, at Kampala’s GEMS Cambridge International School. There were also students representing 35 countries including Spain, France and the United States.

Students performed skits, sang and recited poems, as well as posing questions and giving PowerPoint presentations in their own style. Everything revolved around the causes and effects of, and solutions for, climate change.

Children can bring hope, especially when it comes to climate change, says lawyer turned social entrepreneur, environmentalist and founder of Little Green Hands, Joseph Masembe. He is showcasing a “new form of environmental stewardship” in Uganda involving young people.

According to The State of Uganda’s Population Report, released in February 2013, the east African nation has the world’s youngest population, with over 78 percent aged under 30.

“A wise man once told me a child’s mind is like wet cement -when you write on it, it’s permanent,” Masembe tells IPS. “So involving children at such a tender age in environment conservation means the future is ensured and it’s guaranteed.

“Children are the future generation, but at the moment we are in this climate change quagmire because adults cut trees with impunity. We do not think twice … we didn’t plant them.

“But if we get these children to start planting trees at a tender age, by the time they grow up they will have sentimental value attached to these trees, so they won’t chop them down,” Masembe explains.

It’s getting thumbs green that was the focus of the Little Hands Go Green Festival, an annual eventcreated by Masembe in 2012. In December that year, more than 16,000 children flocked to Kampala’s Kololo Airstrip, where they were given seedlings to take home and plant fruit trees. Masembe says “Africa’s only green festival” was even “gate-crashed” by Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, after he heard about the large gathering of children. Out of it, sprang the ICCCC.

As highlighted in the The State of Uganda’s Population Report2013, Uganda has been identified as one of the world’s least prepared and most vulnerable countries when it comes to the climate change. The study stressed that Global Climate Change models project the nation will experience an increase in average temperatures up by up to 1.5 ^oC in the next 20 years.

Hot days are increasing, cold days decreasing; glaciers on the Rwenzori Mountains are continuing to melt and almost all regions of the country are experiencing “intense, frequent and prolonged droughts,” the report said.

“You find that now the rains do not come as they used to come, the seasons are changing and it’s a lot hotter,” Masembe tells IPS. “The dry season takes a lot longer. Farmers are telling you their crops are being affected a lot. You have mudslides in Bududa (eastern Uganda) almost every other year.”

Despite her age, Olga is all too aware of the impact of climate change on her country, which she notes is called the “Pearl of Africa” but which, because of climate change, “will no longer be the Pearl of Africa. Lake Victoria and (Lake) Albert will dry up… climate (change) is something that can destroy a country.”

“The ozone layer is the layer that protects from the direct sunshine, so when it’s spoilt we shall get the direct sunshine and the plants will dry up, drought will be there,” she adds.

As she plants a tree at the end of the ICCCC, Olga says that she will encourage her mother, father and two siblings to do the same. “I’ll keep encouraging people to plant trees … They have a responsibility.”

Olga is fortunate that she attends an international school where the study of climate change is on the curriculum. “In the international schools they teach it, in the local schools, which is the majority, they don’t,” says Masembe. “So we have to find other ways to sneak it in, through extracurricular activities for instance.”

“The Green Festival (to be held on August 24) is one opportunity. And this conference, which will become annual, will become part of the way whereby children can use their voices and hopefully adults can start to listen.”

Deborah (in red), a 14-year-old Rwandan girl who lost her parents when she was young, at Gisimba Memorial Centre orphanage in Kigali. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KIGALI, Jul 11 2014 (IPS)

Every day, 14-year-old Deborah wakes up in an orphanage, goes to school, and comes home to an orphanage. It does not matter when or for how long she leaves the orphanage, she always knows she’ll be back.

“This is where I live, this is my home,” says the teen, sitting at a wooden desk with other children at the Gisimba Memorial Centre orphanage. She has been intensely colouring in a nativity scene of one famous family – Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus.

Deborah had both her parents for only three years, before her mother died. Her father passed away two years later. Both had AIDS. Her four sisters and brothers also live at Gisimba Memorial Centre, in the Nyamirambo quarter of the Rwandan capital.“Decades of research show that orphanages cannot provide the care children to develop to their full potential, leading to attachment disorders and developmental delays that can be physical, intellectual, communication, social and emotional” – communications consultant Annet Birungi

The original Gisimba orphanage was founded by Peter Gisimba and wife Dancilla, and began taking in children, orphaned through a variety of circumstances, in the 1980s. The couple died in the late 1980s. When the orphanage was renamed the Gisimba Memorial Centre in 1990, it was home to 50 children and had reached its capacity.

That was until the 1994 genocide when up to 700 people took shelter in Gisimba. “People were sleeping in the dormitories, outside, everywhere, as long as they were together,” coordinator Elie Munezero tells IPS.

Close to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed during those bloody 100 days.

Today there are about 125 young people living at the orphanage. “All generations,” explains 50-year-old Munezero. “Babies, infants, adolescents, young adults.” The youngest is two years old. The two eldest are 30. About 40 percent are aged under 16.

Deborah and the other siblings are just some of the estimated 2,171 children today languishing in 29 orphanages across the east African country, says Annet Birungi, a communications consultant for Rwanda’s National Commission for Children (NCC) and UNICEF.

Nine years in an orphanage, in Deborah’s case, does not shock Birungi. She points out the alarming results of the National Survey on Institutional Care, conducted in 2011-2012 by Rwanda’s Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion (MIGEPROF) and groundbreaking NGO Hopes and Homes for Children (HHC). It found thatabout 13.6 percent children living in institutions had been there for more than 15 years.

Staying in institutional care can scar children for a lifetime, with those aged between 0-3 years especially vulnerable.

“Decades of research show that orphanages cannot provide the care children to develop to their full potential, leading to attachment disorders and developmental delays that can be physical, intellectual, communication, social and emotional,” says Birungi, adding that “abuse, neglect, physical and sexual violence, isolation and marginalization are common in orphanages.”

Before colonial rule, there was a culture of treating “every child as your own”, notes Birungi. “Children were for the community and when a mother died, it was a responsibility of aunties and grandparents, family friends to take care of the orphan (s).”

The atrocities of 1994 are said to have left at least half a million children without parents. During and after the genocide,women informally took in children from the opposite ethnic group. Mothers were encouraged to be a “malayika mulinzi” (“guardian angel”). Systems of “kinship and foster care” operated, even if informally.

At the same, this was when most of the orphanages that exist today appeared but most of them lack exit plans for children who have grown up in them.

Meanwhile, the belief that children are better off in institutions than in families has also kept some children in care, says Birungi, and while there is no denying that some centres are able to provide shelter, food, clothing, health and education, they cannot offer the love of a family.

Today, there is no power and no water in Gisimba. Both have been cut off because the bills have remained unpaid, says Munezero. “Nothing is good,” he adds in despair.

A major issue with children being cared for in institutions is that some may still have living members of their family.  “You could be calling a child an orphan but he’s not,” Munezero admits.

The African Child Policy Forum (ACPF), an independent, not-for-profit, institution has reported that the majority of so-called “orphans” adopted from Africa by foreigners have at least one parent still alive.

International adoption was temporarily suspended by Rwanda in August 2010, to allow the country work on implementation of the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, which calls on states to consider national solutions before international adoption.

Birungi says the government wants to revive the culture of “treating every child as your own”. NCC is currently working with HHC to reintegrate those living at Gisimba back into families.

An NCC-trained psycho-social team is in the final stages of the reintegration process and Gisimba will be transformed into a primary school to benefit children in the surrounding area, according to Birungi. On July 10, HHC announced that the first of five children had been moved out of Home of Hope, another Kigali institution.

HHC’s country director in Rwanda, Claudine Nyinawagaga, says a number of alternative care services are available for children in the country, including “kinship care”, when a young person is placed with extended family, neighbours or friends.

But national adoption is yet to be fully implemented and since HCC started the closure of the first Rwandan institution in 2011, only one child has fully undergone the domestic adoption process. NCC-drafted guidelines on domestic and international adoption are awaiting approval by Rwanda’s Cabinet.

“Several meetings with local authorities revealed that the general population and local authorities do not have enough information about adoption,” Nyinawagaga tells IPS. “This is likely to be addressed through the approval of the adoption guidelines, and the sensitisation of the community.”

So, for the time being, Deborah remains in an institution.

“I like singing and drumming,” she says, when asked what she likes doing in her spare time. “We have a small choir that I’m in.”

Despite her plight, she is ambitious and looking forward to her future: “to work in an industry, and make fruit juice and yoghurt.”

Rwandan fashion designer Colombe Ndutiye Ituze uses the services of the women who sew at the Centre César, a community centre in village of Avega in Kimironko, near Kigali, Rwanda's capital. The centre runs free training sessions and classes here include course in mechanics, traditional singing and dancing, and silk screening. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KIGALI, Jun 23 2014 (IPS)

Before Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, Salaam Uwamariya’s husband, a professor, was the family breadwinner, providing for her and their eight children. Uwamariya sold vegetables at a nearby market to supplement their income.

But like many in this Central African nation, her life changed in just the 100 days starting in April 1994 when close to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed. Among the dead were her husband and her two eldest children.

But Uwamariya has been able to slowly rebuild her life by making clothes that are sold locally and overseas and which have also even been shown on African catwalks.“It’s exciting making clothes for people in Canada because we’re getting some income...The challenges are now to get a niche business, to get more orders, more clothes to sew.” -- Salaam Uwamariya

Today, thanks to Centre César, a community centre which in 2005 “adopted” her village of Avega in Kimironko, near Kigali, the country’s capital, Uwamariya has learned new skills and is able to support her family.

“I lost my family, a lot of materials, my house, everything,” she tells IPS in the local Kinyarwanda language.

She also lost her parents, aunts and uncles in the genocide.

“I was affected greatly… I can’t express it…”

Avega is made up of 150 houses and has a population of 750. With financial support from Canadian charity Ubuntu Edmonton, the centre runs training sessions for residents whose lives have been scarred by genocide. Classes here include courses in mechanics and silk screening. There is also a school sponsorship programme and daycare centre and a sewing shop where Uwamariya works. Over 85 people are said to pass through the doors of Centre César and benefit from their services every week.

“[Sewing] has improved my life a lot because I get some revenue from it. It improves my life and the lives of my children,”  says Uwamariya, who says she earns up to 3,000 Rwandan Francs (4.44 dollars) for making one dress, which she says takes no more than two days. All sewers are paid a fair trade wage, with the money going directly to the women.

Using industrial machines, members of the centre have been taught to sew by Edison Hategekimana, one of the centre’s two master tailors and the only man here. He taught Uwamariya over a year, but she says it “wasn’t challenging”.

On any given day up to 20 women, including Uwamariya, 58, are packed into a room working laboriously on dresses, jackets, pants, bags, aprons and pyjamas bags and jewellery in bold African prints.

Many of the items they tirelessly piece together are the creations of upcoming Rwandan fashion designer Colombe Ndutiye Ituze.

Strangely enough it was an international counterpart, Canadian Johanne St. Louis, who pointed out the local talent available to help Ituze.

The pair met at the Rwanda Fashion Festival 2010. St. Louis is the CEO of St. Louis Fashion and Dreamyz Loungewear. Ituze launched her INCO Icyusa label, one of Rwanda’s first fashion houses, in 2011.

“I really loved her clothes and I asked her where do you get things done and she told me they were made by these women [at Centre César],” Ituze tells IPS.

“I came here [to Centre César] in 2011. From 2012 all my production was done here. I’ve worked with the tailors in town, but here they are very talented. For large orders they’re the best people to come to.”

When Ituze discovered the centre, she said many of its members possessed basic sewing skills. St. Louis had trained some, and those she trained taught others.

“The first time I came here they were good, but not as good as they are now. They’re improving all the time,” says Ituze.

Today the clothes that Uwamariya and her colleagues stitch together are sold in Ituze’s store in Nziza, Kigali. St Louis sells pieces in her clothing store in her house in Cannington, about 110 km outside Toronto.

“It’s exciting making clothes for people in Canada because we’re getting some income,” says Uwamariya. “The challenges are now to get a niche business, to get more orders, more clothes to sew.”

“I want to partner with other people, with other fashion designers.”

This may happen sooner rather than later, with Ituze and St.Louis talking to more international stores about stocking their designs.

Together they opened DODA Fashion House last September. Doda means, “to sew” in Kinyarwanda.

They have a workshop in Kimironko, Kigali, which will eventually employ four fulltime staff and the plan to hire an additional 14 women to begin training and creating products.

In the next five years their workshop will hopefully offer training courses in commercial sewing, design, sewing machine mechanics and marketing. It’s a huge step for the industry in tiny Rwanda, which doesn’t have a fashion school.

Meanwhile, back at Centre César, its supervisor Alain Rushayidi tells IPS he will only be truly satisfied when the charity is able to transfer its ownership to the people of Avega.

“This centre has to become their centre. In 10 or 15 years this will belong to the members, all of them,” he says.

Rushayidi says a structure to help the centre become sustainable and financially independent is currently being implemented.

“I can’t explain the challenges before we started [the centre],” Rushayidi says.

“We used to have a food bank in the village. We have people infected with HIV.”

Ten years later, he says “of course things aren’t 100 percent better, but lives have improved.”

Every day for a year David, the then timekeeper at a Kumero Model Primary School in the Rwenzori mountains, Uganda, near the Democratic Republic of Congo border, would ring his bell, having no idea there were four exploded cluster bombs inside. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Jun 12 2014 (IPS)

The late Malian writer and ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ said, “In Africa, when an old person dies, it is a library that burns”, so huge is the loss of oral stories and information. It’s a saying that rings true with the Acholi ethnic group, that was left devastated by the war in northern Uganda. “Our culture believes, when someone dies, there is a grave and it documents the loss. Now we need to look beyond the graves,” Acholi chief Rwoth Achoro says.

So for the past nine months the Refugee Law Project (RLP) from the faculty of law at Uganda’s Makerere University have been traversing parts of Uganda affected by conflict, collecting objects and archives from people who have lived through war and continue to be haunted by it. According to RLP, there have been 44 different armed groups registered in Uganda since independence in 1962.

The project, called “Travelling Testimonies“ has toured Kitgum, Kasese, Arua, West Nile and Luwero, and recorded and amassed more than 30 hours of testimony from veterans, ex-combatants and other war-affected men, women and children.

There are items like a blanket, given generously to the project by a grieving mother who had been keeping it as a memento for her abducted son.

“She donated it as a symbol of being able to share his memory and the idea of missing person’s beyond her own space,” Kara Blackmore, exhibition curator, anthropologist and heritage consultant, tells IPS.

There’s a United Nations World Food Programme bag from a disbanded internally displaced persons (IDP) camp, a split rocket propeller grenade and a bowl used in a reconciliation ceremony.

The tangible objects, which may seem to be simple, everyday items to look are powerful because they hold greater meaning and are people’s own voices.

“There’s everyone from an arms trader to landmine survivors to widows,” says Blackmore, who spoke recently at the exhibition in Luwero.

In a 2007 survey conducted among the country’s war-affected communities, a staggering 95 percent of respondents said they wanted memorials established.

The RLP is constructing the National Memory and Peace Documentation Centre (NMPDC) in Kitgum and say they’ll embark on “aggressive fundraising” next year to complete this. The museum is currently only “a slab”, says Blackmore, but the organisation is trying to find funding to finish it and have a full-scale multimedia exhibition on “Travelling Testimonies” there.

“Travelling Testimonies” is the first exhibition to display anything related to Ugandan conflicts besides the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) one, let alone go travelling.

“The research is so community-led that you just arrive and say ‘this is what we’re looking for’ and then people take you in this direction,” explains Blackmore.

“It’s like a jigsaw.”

Most people have been willing to talk openly about living through war, but some were emotional.

“There’s some people who become quite saddened by it but everyone in that instance seems to be promoting the idea of memory process,” said Blackmore.

“So even though they feel the sadness from it and feel the sense of lack of humanity, the flip side is ‘yes, but our young people should feel this stuff and should be exposed to it.’”

The last stop for “Travelling Testimonies” will be Makerere University Art Gallery in Kampala, where the collection will be on show from Jun. 19 to Jul. 26, before the material returns to the NMPDC.

But it’s not only there where the stories will stay. RLP have created a digital archive, which will go back to war-affected communities. “Each person will get a copy of a testimonial portrait and a scan,” explains Blackmore.

“We have partner organisations in each area that become keepers of the material should anyone want to access it.” She says this fosters a “sense of ownership” of the community’s history “rather than taking it, writing about it in a foreign language and then publishing it in a place where they can’t access it.”

Ugandan lawyer Gerald Abila is the founder of the award-winning Barefoot Law, a tech-savvy non-profit that uses Facebook, Skype, Twitter, SMS, radio and television partnerships to improve access to justice and the law. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, May 29 2014 (IPS)

When Gerald Abila received an iPhone as a gift almost two years ago, the Ugandan law student didn’t just use it to text his friends. He used it to create what would eventually become the first entity of its kind in East Africa — a tech savvy, multi-award winning, organisation that uses Facebook, Twitter, SMSes, and radio and television partnerships to provide free legal advice and consultations.

“I’d be in class but at the same time I was Tweeting and on Facebook,” the 31-year-old lawyer tells IPS. “So many legal questions would come up so I thought let me start a Facebook group. It was just me giving free advice.”"The future of law is in IT, not law itself." -- Gerald Abila, Barefoot Law’s founder and managing director

Abila set up the Facebook group back in 2012 before he graduated from Kampala International University with his law degree. What began as a Facebook group with just 100 members, whom Abila helped every Saturday from 3 to 4pm, has now grown into Barefoot Law, a not-for-profit organisation with over 16,000 online followers and an Android app.

“I moved around the country and after that I decided to turn this into an organisation because access to legal services is a nightmare,” Abila, Barefoot Law’s founder and managing director, says.

“It’s like the health sector – you only go to a doctor when you start feeling sick. You only go to a lawyer when there’s an issue you go to court over.”

At the start, the Barefoot Law team worked remotely. Only four months later did they set up offices in Bukoto, Kampala.

Today the organisation has seven full time volunteers, including a tech person operating from Germany. They receive about 50 queries a day on a variety of issues via social media platforms, Skype, email, phone calls and SMSes.

Abila, who will speak at this week’s eLearning Africa 2014 International Conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training in Kampala, says at least 10 queries a day are employment-related. Most people simply want to find out their rights.

“Succession and property is also a very big issue,” says Abila, who injects a portion of his earnings from teaching and handling other legal cases into Barefoot Law.

“We educate and correspond. Every day we get an aspect of the law we think has been ignored, for example the land act which provides for rights of a squatter, and post about it on social media.”

Barefoot Law provides free legal advice and consultations and has over 16,000 online followers and an Android app.

Lack of Knowledge About Legal Rights

Through no fault of their own, the majority of Ugandans are not aware of their legal rights. But the internet is a powerful tool.

News of the organisation’s good work has even spread to Kidepo, which lies on Uganda’s border with South Sudan. A man there discovered their services and travelled to Kampala to seek advice on a land conflict. His case was eventually sorted out through mediation.

Even people residing thousands of kilometres away in Somalia know about Barefoot Law. 

Anthony Latim, 38, struggled to get his employer, an NGO, to give him worker’s compensation after he had a serious motorbike accident during work in 2010. He spent four months in a Ugandan hospital with a broken neck and urethra and he hasn’t worked since 2011.

Frustratingly, his case was delayed and then eventually withdrawn without his consent by his own legal representative. He lost hope until he asked his friends on Facebook if they knew of a reputable legal organisation that could help him.

Amazingly, an old friend from Uganda, who lives in Somalia and “who’s always on the internet” told him about Barefoot Law. Within a day Latim was informed he had a right to compensation and was put in touch with an organisation handling employment disputes.

“My interpretation of the law is a layman’s interpretation.

“I’m very grateful that for the first time I was able to sit down with a lawyer in Uganda who did not ask me for any money,” Latim tells IPS.

Latim’s lawyers are now in the process of initiating mediation with his employers.

Abila believes that the only way for Uganda to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is for people to be sensitised  “on the rule of law, as once it’s violated nothing else can be achieved.”

Preventing Misinterpretation of Country’s Laws

Still many are ignorant of the country’s laws.

Uganda’s lawmakers passed 19 bills in the last parliament, between June 2013 and May 2014, says Irene Ikomu fromParliament Watch — an organisation that provides “virtual tracking” of parliament through live Tweets data and expert analysis and reviews.

“Compared to previous parliaments it’s a lot,” Ikomu, a lawyer and 2014 Young African Leaders Initiative Network(YALI) fellow, tells IPS.

These include the notorious Anti-Pornography Bill, approved by parliament just before Christmas. Earlier versions of the bill had sweeping definitions of “pornography” which mentioned the “sexual parts of a person such as breasts, thighs, buttocks or genitalia.” Uganda’s Minister for Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo warned women wearing miniskirts in public would be arrested.

Yet neither the bill or the final Anti-Pornography Act 2014, which President Yoweri Museveni assented to on Feb. 6, contained the word “miniskirt”. But this didn’t stop Lokodo and some local media having a field day with the supposed “miniskirt bill”.

Parliament Watch was the first to obtain and disseminate a final draft of the act.

“That’s when people started saying ‘oh it doesn’t say anything about miniskirts directly,’” recalls Ikomu.

In mid-February Barefoot Law began receiving up to 200 queries a day from people across the country, including a woman in Mbale, in eastern Uganda. She’d almost been stripped by a group of motorbike taxis and rowdy youth who said she was dressed in a miniskirt, which they claimed was unlawful. When she went to the police they did nothing.

“We’d received so many of those inquiries so we decided to share it,” says Abila.

Within an hour 7,000 people had reposted the Barefoot Law Facebook alert about the incident, with media houses and the police also picking up on it. People were informed of the reality of the law.

The Barefoot Law team receive about 50 queries a day via social media platforms, Skype, email, phone and SMS, mostly from people they never met in person, on a variety of issues. To the far right is client Anthony Latim. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

Barefoot Law Expands to Rural Areas

Reaching people in rural areas is a challenge but Barefoot Law have joined forces with Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET), which has set up outreach centres across the country. Anyone needing legal advice can contact the facilities, some of which have internet access and can reach Abila’s team.

They also have a collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Fund, which involves uploading Barefoot Law content to a Uganda Content Portal, which makes the information accessible to kiosks in remote parts of the country.

“We have also partnered with radio stations in hard-to-reach areas. Stations simply calls us at a set time, and we offer free advice to the listeners who call in, or physically go to the station,” says Abila. He hopes to introduce toll-free phone lines and expand to Kenya in the future.

Ikomu and her team continue to live Tweet from Parliament and have posted every law passed since October online.

“When we started we didn’t have lot of money but we had Facebook and Twitter. Those are easy tools you can use to connect with people,” she says.

Abila believes that technology is the “silver bullet” that can be used to overcome legal challenges.

“I always tell my legal colleagues before you study a Masters do a course in something IT-related because the future of law is in IT, not law itself,” he says.

Uganda’s parliament has passed controversial legislation that criminalises the “wilful and intentional” transmission of HIV. Activists have called the HIV Prevention and Management Bill “giant leap backwards in the global struggle against HIV/AIDS.” Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, May 15 2014 (IPS)

Ugandan AIDS bodies and campaigners have warned that the “ugly clauses” of an HIV bill passed by Parliament late Tuesday, which includes the criminalisation of the “wilful and intentional” transmission of the disease, will see many in this East African country “shun the healthcare system”.

Activists are urging President Yoweri Museveni not to sign the 25-page HIV Prevention and Management Bill into law, describing certain parts as “poison” and a “giant leap backwards in the global struggle against HIV/AIDS.”

Uganda has been described as a model when it comes to public policy responses to challenges posed by the HIV epidemic in the 1990s.“We will have someone who is HIV positive in the docks but without any justice system to fend for them.” -- Dianah Nanjeho, a communications consultant at Uganda Network on Law, Ethics and HIV/AIDS

But clause 41 of the legislation, which was drafted in 2008, prescribes a maximum 10 years in jail, a fine of about five million Ugandan shillings (1,980 dollars) or both for anyone who “wilfully and intentionally transmitting HIV/AIDS to another person”.

It’s the most controversial part of the legislation in the eyes of non-governmental organisations and civil society, but was adopted unanimously by members of parliament last week. Another clause prescribes a fine or a maximum five years in jail for those convicted of “attempted transmission”.

Prevalence rates for HIV/AIDS in Uganda dropped from 18 percent in 1992 to 6.4 percent in 2005. But the 2011 National AIDS Indicator Survey, carried out by the Ministry of Health (MOH), showed HIV prevalence rates at 7.3 percent, with 130,000 new infections annually. More than two-thirds of Ugandans have not been tested for HIV/AIDS, according to the research.

Dianah Nanjeho, a communications consultant at Uganda Network on Law, Ethics and HIV/AIDS (UGANET), which works with a coalition of 40 organisations, said there were already high levels of self-stigma and external stigma experienced by those with HIV. Once the bill is enacted, people will “run underground” instead of getting tested, she warned.

“The only path by which someone gets onto treatment is by taking a HIV test. People who don’t know their status are going to shun the health system and say ‘look I can’t go to take a HIV test because the results are going to be displayed in court some day,’” she told IPS.

“We will have someone who is HIV positive in the docks but without any justice system to fend for them.”

Nanjeho pointed to the current case of Rosemary Namubiru, who has been labeled the “killer nurse” by local press who accuse the HIV-infected medical worker of deliberately injecting her blood into a two-year-old patient, in January. AIDS groups claim the reality is that Namubiru, 64, had an accident and is the victim of stigma.

“In that courtroom you would see every single person that is living with HIV looking down and saying this could be me, you know,” said Nanjeho.

Rights agencies say Uganda’s HIV Prevention and Management Bill 2010 is “discriminatory and will impede the fight against AIDS”. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

UGANET argues that section 171 of the Penal Code, which prescribes a seven-year jail term for “any person who unlawfully or negligently does any act which he has reason to believe to be likely to spread the infection of any disease dangerous to life”, is sufficient to prosecute “malicious transmitters of HIV”, among others.

The MOH’s AIDS Control Programme does not support the criminalisation of transmission clause in the bill, nor does it have the backing of the Uganda AIDS Commission, an arm of the President’s office.

Scientists from the Uganda Virus Research Institute and Uganda’s Joint Clinical Research Centre have advised that it will be too hard to manage issues of proof, that is whether a particular person deliberately infected another with HIV, and that there are other effective programming options. Human Rights Watch and other rights groups have said the bill is “discriminatory and will impede the fight against AIDS”.

But Sam Okuonzi, an MP and medical doctor, said the existing law was “not enough”, stressing there had been cases of people spreading HIV intentionally before it was drafted.

“They said ‘we cannot die alone, we must die with some people’ so they went around and started spreading this disease to people who were innocent, who did not know their HIV status, vulnerable people,” he told IPS.

“People in town here with money would go to the villages and start preying on young girls.

“It has happened. This [bill] did not come out of the blue. What is contentious about this?”

AIDS bodies are also upset about clauses of the bill which empowers medical workers to disclose a person’s HIV status to a third party. This, they say, is a “clear violation of human rights and confidentiality” and “represents an institutionalised form of stigma and discrimination.” Another provision provides for mandatory testing of pregnant women and their partners, along with the victims of sexual offences.

HIV/AIDS in Uganda has been described as having a “gendered face”. According to the 2011 Uganda AIDS Indicator Survey, HIV prevalence is higher among women (8.3 percent) than among men (6.1 percent). Prevalence among young women is markedly higher than among men, except for youth age 15 to 17.

These clauses in the bill could lead to women, often the first to find out their HIV status, being subjected to violence or even death at the hands of their partners who accuse them of “bringing HIV into the home”, campaigners caution.

Bernard Gift, collaborative fund project assistant at the International Community of Women Living with HIV and AIDS in Eastern Africa (ICWEA), said the government should concentrate on making more treatment available and addressing problems with drug stockouts.

“Instead of resorting to legislation, when we have actually been here with the virus for almost 30 years, why don’t we look at the alternative? For example, availing people with treatment and ARVs,” he told IPS.

“There are other challenges. For example, of late we’ve been experiencing problems of drug stockouts. That completely affects treatment adherence.”

Nanjeho agreed that instead of “fighting an epidemic” with a law, the focus should be on changing attitudes towards HIV/AIDS, a behavioural disease.

“There’s already enough laws. It’s not the lack of law that’s making us do this. It’s the emotion at the end of the day,” she said.

“HIV wears a human face, it’s associated with human beings.”

Okounzi said as with the Anti-Homosexuality Act, signed into law in February, Museveni would approve the legislation because he knows it will be good for him.

“Because he knows the voters are going to like this bill it will be popular with him,” he said.

Burundi, Kenya and Tanzania have similar laws on criminalising deliberate HIV transmission.

Fabrice Shyaka (left), a 20-year-old Rwandan youth, makes only just enough money to cover his basic needs from selling popcorn in Kanombe, a suburb in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. Credit: Amy  Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KIGALI, May 14 2014 (IPS)

Twenty-year-old Fabrice Shyaka sells popcorn in brown paper bags five nights a week from his stand in a small alleyway, situated next to a DVD shop blaring loud music, and a supermarket. Here in Kanombe, a suburb in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, he is the only person selling popcorn in the area.

“I sell mostly to women and children,” Shyaka, a high school graduate, tells IPS.

Shyaka was able to get permission to set up his business on the side verandah of one of the local shops and his popcorn machine is easily visible and accessibly to pedestrians and shoppers.

“Popcorn was a new business in the country. We [Shyaka and other youth] thought there would be a market for it,” he says.“Unemployment is a general problem in many developing countries but it has particular consequences for a post-genocide situation." -- NAR executive director Eric Mahoro

Shyaka was born in 1994, the year of the Rwandan genocide, in Uganda. His Rwandan parents had fled the country after the killings began during which an estimated that 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus lost their lives.

His family later returned home and Shyaka is now a member of the Voice of Peace Association, a youth club working with Never Again Rwanda (NAR). NAR, a human rights and peace-building organisation founded in response to the genocide, is a platform for young people from different backgrounds to talk about the issues they face.

NAR funds six youth-initiated projects that positively contribute to the community. They aim to educate young people with the leadership skills they need for identifying, developing, and implementing a project.

Besides receiving training and on-going technical support, NAR youth members can apply for project seed money to help them start their businesses. Two years ago, with NAR’s support, Shyaka and a few other young people began to make and sell popcorn.

“I was unemployed until I started selling popcorn. I now make a profit of at least 2,000 Rwandan Francs [three dollars] a day.”

He says selling the popcorn has helped him to earn money on a daily basis. However, it is just enough to cater for his basic needs.

Richard Manzi, a social economic development programme intern with NAR, tells IPS that the popcorn business here is taking off.

”The number of the customers keeps improving. People are getting more interested in popcorn as they walk across the streets of Kigali, where it is now commonly sold. This is unlike two years ago when it had just been discovered by a small number of people in the country,” he says.

“On the weekend a big number of people usually take evening walks and end up buying popcorn.”

According to 2014 statistics from the National Employment Programme (NEP) for Rwanda, about 77 percent or five million of the working population, aged 16 and over, are farm and informal sector workers.

Many of these workers are engaged in extremely low productivity activities that generate low earnings, making them underemployed.

Only about seven percent of the entire workforce here have stable jobs. And of the country’s unemployed, some 67 percent are youth.  According to a World Bank report entitled “Rwanda: Rebuilding an Equitable Society – Poverty Reduction After the Genocide”, of  the country’s 11.5 million people, 53 percent live below the poverty line.

Commercial Street avenue in Kigali’s city centre, Rwanda. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

NAR executive director Eric Mahoro says in post-genocide Rwanda, employment is vital for stability, reintegration, economic growth and sustainable peace.

“Unemployment is a general problem in many developing countries but it has particular consequences for a post-genocide situation. That’s why we’re especially focused on it,” he tells IPS.

NAR says it is engaged with over 97 clubs and associations made of up youth in and outside Rwanda, reaching over 7,000 Rwandan youth.

“You have a lot of orphans who are helpless and schooling is particularly very difficult for them.

“You have a number of youth who are traumatised and are looking back on their past experience, which might affect the way they look at employment.”

Bosco Bahati, 23, is one of those young people still affected by the trauma of his past.

Bahati weaves thin wool wristbands, in the back garden of the brick house that he shares with three other people, as chickens opposite him stand in mud puddles. One, in black, white, red and blue bears the initials RFP, in reference to Rwanda’s ruling party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Another says Liverpool, referring to the English football team.

“It takes me two hours to make them,” Bahati tells IPS, through a translator in the local Kinyarwanda language, about the wristbands which have different embroidered writing on them.

“After making them I try to find someone who likes them,” says Bahati who earns between 300 and 500 Rwandan francs (less than one dollar) for each bracelet.

Unlike Shyaka he has no set place to market his wares. Making these bracelets is the only thing he can do to earn a little bit of money.

Even now he’s lucky if he sells even a few bracelets a day to go towards paying his rent. Each month he pays 4,333 Rwandan francs (6.35 dollars) to rent a room with a mattress here.

After losing his parents in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide when he was just four-years-old, Bahati escaped with his older sister to neighbouring Burundi, where they stayed with relatives.

Two years later his sister became ill and died. When Bahati’s family, who were poor and couldn’t afford his school fees, started mistreating him, he fled. In 2004, aged just 14, he crossed the Burundi-Rwanda border on foot and reached Nyamata, a town in eastern Rwanda. From there he hitchhiked to the capital.

With no highschool education and no family, life has left Bahati behind.

“If god wishes, I will go back to school and study like others and learn English, so I can have some hope for my life.”

He joined World Mission, a club affiliated with NAR. While NAR only supports the club, Bahati has not applied for funding from them for his business efforts.

Bahati “lives [in poverty] because of the genocide,” Grace Usanase from NAR tells IPS. His life, Usanase says, is a reflection of what the life of genocide survivors is often like.

It’s also a life filled with uncertainty. “I don’t know what I’m going to do in the future,” Bahati says.

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, May 7 2014 (IPS)

Every morning at six a.m. before he goes to school, and every night at six p.m. after he gets home from school, Emmanuel, 11, knows what he must do: take his antiretroviral pills.

“They are very sour,” says the shy and gentle boy, who was born with HIV and is cared for by his elderly grandmother, his parents having died from AIDS when he was one year old.

“But I don’t mind taking the medicine. I’m used to it now,” he told IPS.

Emmanuel may be taking his medicine properly, but for many of the 35,500 children in Uganda on HIV treatment, daily ARVs are too much of a bitter pill to swallow, especially if they don’t understand why they need them.

Healing hug: Counsellor Cathy Kakande empowers HIV-positive children with medicine, information and lots of love. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

The Young Lives study presented by Ugandan researcher Rachel Kuwuma at a conference in Cape Town in December found that not knowing why they needed medicine was a big reason for non-adherence in young people.

“At first I didn’t know why I was taking drugs and didn’t put much effort into it so sometimes I would just throw it away…in the toilet,” Mika, 11, is quoted in the research, which looked at HIV-positive children in Uganda and Zimbabwe over two years.

In Uganda, in 2012, just one in three children who needed ARVs received them, according to United Nations data.

Cathy Kakande works for Namugongo Fund for Special Children, a Ugandan group providing Emmanuel with the drugs for free. She is also a counsellor to the boy and his grandmother. Kakande told IPS that Uganda’s policy is not to reveal their HIV status to children until they reach 13 years of age.

“We told Emmanuel ‘this is your life, so if you don’t take the medicine you’ll die’,” says Kakande. “He takes it because he’s supposed to.”

But children will be children, and Dr. Edward Bitarakwate, the Uganda director of Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric AIDS Foundation, says not knowing can lead to a child refusing to co-operate.

“Some types of medicine taste horrible and if you’ve not told the child that they have a chronic condition that needs to be treated, that can be a problem,” he says.

Some children living with HIV are told by their carers they have tuberculosis (TB) and other diseases.

“The child is, like, ’man, this TB, I’ve read about it, I can’t have TB for five years,'” Bitarakwate tells IPS.

In Uganda, like in many other African countries deeply impacted by AIDS, children’s drug taking is commonly mediated through carers. If a parent, sibling or guardian is discriminated against or fearful of being shunned for being HIV-positive or having an HIV-positive child, they may be reluctant to give ARVs or not be open about it.

This is but one of many reasons why the scale-up of ARV treatment in Africa is leaving children behind. In 21 high-burden African countries, only 34 percent of eligible children received ARV therapy compared to 68 percent of adults.

“Some mums don’t want to be seen carrying a shopping bag full of medicines,” says Bitarakwate.

It is worse when the child acquired HIV from the parents, he says: “There’s that guilt.”

Like the virus, self-stigmatisation can be transmitted: “The child grows up and finds out ‘I’ve got this terrible disease and my parents won’t even tell me about because it’s a bad thing’,” says Bitarakwate.

Emmanuel’s grandmother fears telling her neighbours near the Kampala house she rents about her HIV-positive grandson, says Kakande.

Not only is she scared, she’s also burdened financially. “She earns just 800 Ugandan shillings (less than a dollar) a day from selling sugarcane and struggles to pay the rent,” says Kakande.“They have only one meal a day. Sometimes Emmanuel takes his medicine just with water.”

ARVS on an empty stomach can cause nausea. Lack of food is listed as one reason why children don’t take drugs in the Young Lives study.

Other factors are not knowing the reason, fear of being seen by others, fear of being scolded, failure to meet expectations of adults, and loss of hope in life among children repeatedly ill.

The study concluded that adherence problems in children were commonly shaped by their social context and implicate their carers.

Waiting for a miracle

“One very, very common challenge” that this and other research ignore is the influence of Uganda’s born-again, Pentecostal churches, says Jacquelyne Alesi, programme director of the Uganda Network of Young People Living with HIV/AIDS.

“We’ve lost over 10 kids that way,” Alesi tells IPS. “They stopped asking for medicine because they believed they were going to be prayed for and they were going to be healed.”

Emmanuel has two more years until he officially learns that he has HIV.

“When we disclose their status, they [children] may segregate themselves,” says Kakande. “It’s our role to empower them. But for young positives, this is really very difficult.”

Dr Solomie Jebessa, a senior technical advisor at the African Network for Care of Children Affected by HIV/AIDS (ANECCA), says the consequences of children not taking their medicine properly can be fatal because the disease progresses much faster in children compared to adults.

“We’re losing a lot of children before getting them into the healthcare system,” she tells IPS.

Stigma can be equally, if not more devastating than the virus, says Dr Jebessa, who has worked with HIV-positive children in Uganda and Ethiopia.

From her experience, school clubs and activities where young people facing the same challenges can interact are crucial.

“There is a high need for organised psycho-social care in Africa,” she says. “A lot has to be done to make these kids comfortable at school and at the community level.”

Excerpt:

Sandra Ntebi, who runs a hotline and helps Uganda’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community find alternative, safe accommodation, pictured here at the 2013 Gay Pride parade. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Apr 23 2014 (IPS)

As she sits in a Kampala hotel holding a mobile phone that rings frequently, Sandra Ntebi tells IPS: “I’m really exhausted. I don’t know where to start. We have many cases pending.” Ntebi manages a hotline and is helping Uganda’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community find alternative, safe accommodation after they have faced harassment.

“Right now, some people have been thrown out of their homes, some are in jail. Every day there are cases.”

It’s nearly 4.30pm on Tuesday, Apr. 22, just over two months since Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni signed a draconian anti-gay bill that further criminalises homosexuality in this East African nation.Many activists had fled Uganda to seek asylum in different countries, while most LGBTI organisations were closed “due to fear”.

So far today Ntebi has received calls relating to four new cases concerning LGBTI people or those perceived to be LGBTI that include incidents of evictions by landlords, police arrests and mob attacks.

In total she and a colleague have received reports of about 130 different cases across the country since Museveni inked his signature on the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014 in late February.

The law prescribes life imprisonment for some homosexual acts and also criminalises the “promotion of homosexuality”, among other measures.

“The situation is tense. Right now this act is promoting violence,” says Ntebi.

“I get the reports since I have the hotline. We sit down later with the details then categorise them into evictions, arrests and assaults.”

Today her co-worker has received a call about a new incident in Hoima, western Uganda. Among the cases Ntebi is dealing with is a fresh attack on Brenda, an HIV positive, transgender sex worker in her late 30s who lives just outside the capital, Kampala.

In March Brenda was “paraded” before local media, outed as a transsexual, beaten, undressed and arrested.

“We bailed her out, she went back to her house in the village and she couldn’t even leave because people were out every day waiting for her,” says Ntebi. “They were throwing stones.”

Brenda went to stay with a friend based on advice from the LGBTI hotline. Then on Thursday, Apr. 17, she was beaten again, taken to hospital and is now holed up in a hotel.

“We’re trying to secure a house for her to rent,” says Ntebi, who on Wednesday went to help Brenda.

Around Mar. 19, the same time that Brenda was first attacked, three Ugandan men who were perceived to be gay were assaulted and admitted to the Mulago Hospital in Kampala. A few weeks later, Ntebi says, the team were alerted to a possible suicide of an LGBTI person by an embassy.

On Apr. 3 crime intelligence officers raided the Makerere University Walter Reed Project clinic, a non-profit collaboration between Makerere University in Kampala and the U.S. Military HIV Research Programme. Police claimed the project, one of the few in Kampala willing to offer services to LGBTI people with AIDS, was “carrying out recruitment and training of young males in unnatural sex acts.”

Many activists and other members of the gay community are now in hiding, says Ntebi, who is wearing a black vest from a 2006 campaign run by Sexual Minorities Uganda (SM-UG), an NGO and the umbrella for all homosexual organisations in Uganda. The words “Leave me in peace” are embroidered on the back.

Ntebi says many activists had fled Uganda to seek asylum in different countries, while most LGBTI organisations were closed “due to fear”.

Ntebi now only goes to work at her office when it’s absolutely essential.

Beyondy is the nickname for a 23-year-old fashion designer who is in hiding.

He used to spend his days sewing a dress for a client or mastering routines for upcoming events, like the second Gay Pride parade in 2013.

Since the bill was signed he has moved to a tiny one-bedroom shack, tucked away at the back of a slum in a lively Kampala suburb. Beyondy now spends his days mostly indoors watching music videos by Beyoncé, Pink and Rita Ora, only going outside when he has to.

“I like Rita’s style – the blonde hair, her red lipstick,” cooes Beyondy, wearing a T-shirt and board shorts showing off his muscular build, when IPS met him recently.

“I wanted to be a performer, for people to see my talent and discover me. But right now I think it’s impossible. Right now it’s all about survival, saving your life and being quiet, being underground all the time.”

In the past Beyondy was attacked “a lot”, and fears he’ll be targeted again now that the anti-gay act is in force.

“You know someone was saying recently, ‘if we had a choice between forgiving a rapist and a gay person, we’d rather choose a rapist,’” he says.

Activists are hoping a petition filed in March challenging the act will come up in the country’s constitutional court early next month.

According to the Ugandan newspaper The Observer, the government has filed a defence, claiming the act does not contravene the right to equality and freedom from cruel, inhumane and degrading punishment guaranteed under the country’s constitution. The government wants the petition dismissed.

But even if the law is overturned Beyondy says it will take much more than a court ruling to change social attitudes towards homosexuality in Uganda.

In the current climate of homophobia, which activists stress has been “imported” to Uganda via western evangelists, virtually everyone is aware they can use another person’s sexuality to exact revenge.

“It’s in people’s minds and even if it’s overturned they’ll still think about it.”

But he’s adamant he will remain in Uganda to “rebuild both personally and professionally”.

Louise Ingabire, 27, the manager of Inzozi Nziza (Sweet Dreams), Rwanda’s first ice-cream store which is based in Butare. She says thanks to the store she now has dreams for her future. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
BUTARE, Rwanda, Apr 17 2014 (IPS)

From all across Rwanda, and even from parts of neighbouring Burundi, people flock to the southern town of Butare to a little shop called Inzozi Nziza or Sweet Dreams. They come here for a taste of something of the unknown, something most have never tasted in their lives — the sweet, cold, velvety embrace of ice cream.

Here, at this central African nation’s first ever ice cream store that opened four years ago, customers can buy soft serve ice cream in flavours such as sweet cream, passion fruit, strawberry and pineapple. Toppings include fresh fruit, Rwandan honey, chic-chips and homemade granola. Rwandan black tea and coffee are also on sale. "Some Rwandans like ice-cream but it’s a new thing. We still have some work to do, to tell others that they’ll enjoy it.” -- Louise Ingabire, the manager of Inzozi Nziza or Sweet Dreams

The little store, which has the words “ice cream. coffee. dreams” written across its signage, is milking Rwandan’s curiosity about ice cream for all its worth and “changing lives” in the process, says Louise Ingabire, the manager of Inzozi Nziza.

As she sits at a table in the store, about to devour a honey-flavoured soft serve swirl, Ingabire, 27, tells IPS: “Ice cream is important. I like ice cream because it gives you energy but is also relaxing. Some Rwandans like ice cream but it’s a new thing. We still have some work to do, to tell others that they’ll enjoy it.”

True to the words written across the signage, this store certainly made some of Ingabire’s dreams come true.

“I didn’t have a job before, I just stayed at home. Now I have a vision for the future. I’m making money and I can give some of it to my family,” Ingabire says.

Butare, which has a population of about 89,600 and is located 135 km from the capital, Kigali, is the home of the National University of Rwanda. And Inzozi Nziza has become a social hub for tired students looking to treat themselves to something sweet, cool and different.

“It’s something uniting people here,” 24-year-old Kalisa Migendo, who is studying agriculture at the university, tells IPS.

“If you need to go out and talk to a friend, a girl or a boy, you come to Inzozi Nziza for an ice cream.” Most of the ingredients for the ice cream are sourced locally, and the milk comes from a depot in nearby Nyanza. The vanilla beans and cocoa are imported.

Inzozi Nziza was opened by theatre director Odile Gakire Katese, aka Kiki. Katese met Alexis Miesen and Jennie Dundas, the co-founders of Blue Marble Ice Cream in Brooklyn, and they partnered together to open Inzozi Nziza in 2010.

“An ice cream shop, [Katese] proposed, might help to put the human pieces back together by rebuilding spirits, hopes and family traditions,” Miesen tells IPS.

At the start, Miesen and Dundas owned the shop in partnership with the women who work there and had shares in the business, which is a cooperative and nonprofit. They didn’t set financial targets, but waited for 18 months before they transferred their shares over to the women, who had proved their business credentials.

The success of Sweet Dreams is not an exception. Fatuma Ndangiza, deputy CEO of the Rwanda Governance Board, points out that many small businesses here are owned by women.

“Small businesses are mostly managed by women but when it comes to big business where you have to compete for big tenders, very few women are there. Women are newcomers to big business,” she points out.

“We have more women entrepreneurs. It’s an area where women are taking an interest, both in and outside Kigali.”

While she says that eating ice cream is somewhat new to Rwanda, she’s behind the idea of the store.

“I think it’s great. It requires a lot of skills and changing people’s mindsets because selling and eating ice cream is not [part of our] culture. I think being able to innovate and introduce this on the market, and the process of making it, is quite interesting.”

The Butare shop now employs nine women, all of whom spend their spare time practicing with Ingoma Nshya, the nation’s first and only female drumming troupe, which was started by Katese 10 years ago.

The group is made up of both Hutu and Tutsi women, some survivors of the 1994 genocide, during which close to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed.

Some members of Ingoma Nshya are widows, some orphans. Others have been affected by the mass murder in different ways.

Historically in Rwanda, women were forbidden to drum and many people considered the drums too heavy for women to carry, says Ingabire.

“It’s something which brings unity,” says Ingabire, who lost her father, two siblings and many cousins in the genocide.

“Some of us are survivors; some know someone who was killed. When I’m drumming with them it gives me power because we’re still alive and survivors.”

Rwanda’s official genocide mourning period, known as Icyunamo, began Apr. 7 and continues until Jul. 4. Within the period the women of the Butare ice cream shop are also marking another symbolic event in their lives – Inzozi Nziza’s fourth birthday in June.

Inzozi Nziza has also been featured in a documentary film made by award-winning sibling filmmakers Rob and Lisa Fruchtman. Sweet Dreams tells the story of the Rwandan women trying to forge a future post-genocide and also features the female drummers.

It has been screened in more than a dozen countries around the world, including the United States and United Kingdom, and in other countries of Europe and in Africa. It will premiere in Rwanda later this year.

“We feel the film is about resilience, hope, bravery, resourcefulness and the ability to change the course of your own life,” Lisa Fruchtman, who won an Oscar for film editing in 1984, tells IPS.

Kisenyi slum, in Uganda’s capital, Kampala is believed to be home to a large portion of the country’s almost 12,000 Somali immigrants. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Mar 31 2014 (IPS)

On a Friday afternoon men wearing kamis — long white traditional robes — climb the steps to Somcity Travel, a small family business and travel agency in Kisenyi slum, in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. The agency boasts that they “fly all over the world” but to one destination in particular — Somalia.

“In a day we may have up to five customers – four of them will usually be Somali,” says Mohamed Abdullahi, 25, the manager of Somcity Travel. The travel agency is situated opposite the the Al-Baraka cosmetic store and the Cadaysay shop, which provides mobile money transfer services and sells mobile phones and phone accessories.

“Some of them go [back] for holidays to Somalia. But they always come back. The business is kind of booming. We are booking a lot of tickets,” he tells IPS.

Kisenyi, informally known as Little Mogadishu, has been the heartbeat of the Somalia community in this East African country since the 1990s, according to Abdullahi.

But it was only in 2002 that businesses here started to take off. Today, Kisenyi’s streets are dotted with travel agencies, hotels, restaurants, petrol stations, supermarkets and other businesses — all of which are Somali-owned. And there is also a mosque.

“We are very tough when it comes to business, sometimes we can even challenge Indians,” Abdul Kadir Farah Guled, Charge De Affairs at the Somali embassy in Kampala, who came to Uganda around 1974, tells IPS.

“But our problem is our hot tempers. Sometimes we don’t like each other because of tribal conflicts. But at the end of the day, we support each other.”

Official statistics are hard to come by, but he estimates there could be up to 12,000 Somalis scattered throughout Uganda and that about 85 percent of Kisenyi’s population is Somali, with a large number of them being refugees and Ugandans of Somali-origin. It is believed that the slum could be home to over 4,000 Somali refugees.

The area is a place of transition for many — a stepping stone to a better life for many residents and workers.

“Somalis get respect from Ugandans and the government also supports Somalis,” says Abdullahi. Above his desk, a framed portrait of Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni stares down at him. On the wall alongside it is a Brussels Airlines poster declaring “Africa, all wrapped up for you.”

Abdullahi used to live in Towfiq in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. In 2007, he left the Horn of Africa nation, along with relatives and friends, aged just 17.

“I came here to get an education and live a life [that is] different from [the one I lived] in that place where there is civil war,” he says.

Militants belonging to terrorist network Al-Shabaab were flushed out of Mogadishu in 2011 but still control many rural areas of the country today.

When Abdullahi came to Uganda, where his uncle, Ahmed, had resettled in 2003, he couldn’t speak English. In Somalia the official tongue is Arabic. But today Abdullahi converses impeccably in English and has completed both his O and A levels. Now he works six days a week at Somcity Travel, earning about 200 dollars a month.

“It’s getting better in Somalia but there are still some problems, like homes are bombed. There’s a problem walking at night.”

For most Somali’s coming to Uganda for the first time, the language barrier is a big problem says Shukri Islow, 28, the founder of NGO Somali Youth Action For Change. She founded the organisation to help empower Somalis here and bridge the gap between the two communities.

“When you know the language you feel a sense of belonging,” says Islow, who was born in Somalia and left the country when she was eight. She has lived in Sweden, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, before settling in Uganda in 2009.

“We give them that inspiration, motivation and empower them that they can do it it’s never too late, even if you’re 20.”

Today Islow, who graduated in November from Uganda’s Cavendish University with a bachelor’s degree in international relations and diplomacy, is the face of the Somali youth community in Uganda.

She also counsels  Ugandan African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) soldiers who are deployed to her homeland on how different Somalia is and what to expect when they get there.

Uganda was the first country to deploy troops under AMISOM to Somalia in 2007. A 22,000-strong AU force operates there under a United Nations mandate. Uganda leads the force, with 6,223 troops, but in early March said they would send up to 410 extra to guard U.N. facilities.

The last time Islow was in Somalia was in 2002 when the situation was “much, much better”.

“Right now you don’t know who’s going to kill you tomorrow, and you don’t know the reason. You’re being attacked for your lifestyle or ideology,” she tells IPS.

She’s aware that even if she returns home for a holiday she will be a target.

“I’m more at risk [from Al-Shabaab] if I go there because I’m all over social media and my pictures with Ugandan soldiers are [online],” says Islow.

She has relatives still living in Somalia and, eventually, she would like to return home permanently.

“Of course I’d like to go back because you go east and west, home is the best,” she says.

For the time being she will continue to live elsewhere and hopes to further her studies in Melbourne, Australia.

Abdullahi also hopes to do the same. He has an uncle in Australia and has enrolled in a management course that starts in July at a Sydney college.

“I want to continue with my education and at the same time work and have a new life, a better life, get married and have kids,” he says.

In January, the Somali Embassy in Uganda held its first-ever engagement with the Somali diaspora here to discuss the ongoing stabilisation and peace process in the Horn of Africa nation. Officials hope that educated youth, like Abdullahi and Islow, will return to help rebuild the country.

Already the diaspora has contributed much to Somalia. A 2011 report by the U.N. Development Programme estimates that the Somali diaspora is between one to 1.5 million people. The report stated that Somalis abroad provided much-needed humanitarian assistance back home through remittances – estimated between 1.3 to two billion dollars a year.

Last July, Air Uganda started direct flights from the country’s Entebbe International Airport to Mogadishu.

Abdullahi hasn’t returned to Somalia since he left. And if he does, like many of his clients, it may not be on a one-way ticket.

“Now I’ve adapted to this life of living abroad and some things are not favourable in Somalia so I can’t live there for good,” says Abdullahi.

Michael Mubangizi (l) and his wife Jennifer Musimenta (r) with their daughter Babirye. They do not know what happened to Babirye’s twin whose body disappeared after Musimenta gave birth in Uganda’s national referral hospital. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Mar 27 2014 (IPS)

Dressed in a white dress with black polka dots and pink and red carnations, white knee-high socks and matching patent shoes, Babirye recently celebrated her second birthday. 

“She’s doing well, eating well,” Jennifer Musimenta told IPS in Uganda’s local Luganda language as her husband, Michael Mubangizi, acted as a translator. It is an unwritten policy in Ugandan health facilities that patients were never given access to their own medical records.

“But I’m always thinking about the second child, whether she’s alive or not alive, because I don’t know the truth. I’m always worried.”

The child she’s referring to is Babirye’s sister. In Luganda, Babirye means the first-born of female twins.

Twins are seen as a special blessing among Ugandan families. Mubangizi had a set on his father’s side before his wife gave birth to two girls on Mar. 14, 2012, at Mulago Hospital.

The couple did not know they were expecting twins until Musimenta delivered at Mulago, which is Uganda’s national referral hospital and the country’s largest health facility based in the capital, Kampala.

But within minutes of Musimenta giving birth to the second child, whom they named Nakato, which means second female twin in Luganda, they were told she had died.

The pair were then denied access to their baby’s body. Despite pleading for her own medical records, Musimenta was refused a copy of these too.

“We looked for that dead body for three days,” Mubangizi, who immediately reported the case to the police, told IPS.

“We checked in the mortuary, in the maternity ward, everywhere in the hospital. There was no dead child,” the 30-year-old mechanic said.

Three long days later, the couple were handed the body of a dead baby.

“It was very fresh, as if it had been delivered at that moment,” said Mubangizi. “We said that is not our baby.”

A DNA test, which the desperate pair resorted to, revealed the child was not theirs. And now they don’t know for sure if their daughter is alive or dead.

Nakibuuka Noor Musisi, the programme manager for strategic litigation at advocacy group Centre for Health, Human Rights and Development (CEHURD), said that cases of missing and stolen babies were shockingly all too common in Ugandan hospitals.

“There’s so many cases of mothers who have gone to hospitals [to give birth], especially this particular hospital, and their babies are not given to them,” she told IPS.

“These cases are just reported by the media but their parents don’t take them up [with the courts] because maybe they don’t know where to go.”

She added that it was an unwritten policy in health facilities that patients were never given access to their own medical records in this East African nation.

Grieving, and seeking the truth about their daughter, Mubangizi and  Musimenta, with backing from CEHURD, sued the executive director of Mulago Hospital and the Ugandan attorney general in July 2013.

“When we were faced with this particular case we were forced to go to court to show that actually this is a problem that is happening in the country,” Musisi explained.

The couple argued their constitutional rights had been violated through being denied the access to their medical records, the opportunity to nurture and bring up their child and in the hospital taking her away without permission.

All of this has been coupled with the daily mental anguish and agony they have endured, and are continuing to endure, through not having access to her or her body.

On Wednesday, Mar. 26 the High Court of Uganda ordered Mulago Hospital to furnish the couple with outstanding medical documents, a registry of children delivered on the same day as Babirye and her sister, a list of health workers then on duty and a copy of the DNA test.

Musisi said the ruling set a significant precedent for the rights of Ugandan patients to access their medical records.

“The constitution says that everyone shall have the right to access information, which is in the hands of the state as long as it does not put the state or the security of the state at risk,” she said.

Wednesday’s ruling also has implications for Uganda’s stunningly high maternal morality rate – 438 deaths per 100,000 live births, one of the world’s highest.

“Imagine if you’re a mother who has had a caesarean section and no [medical record] is given to you. As soon as you’re discharged from the hospital, you get home and probably you have a [complication],” said Musisi, speaking at the high court.

“That would mean that you have to go back to that particular health facility. What happens if the facility is very far from your home? These are the reasons we see mothers die.”

The case puts the spotlight on the reason why so many Ugandan women are terrified to give birth in hospitals.

“I won’t go back to deliver in that hospital because what happened two years ago could happen again,” said Musimenta.

Mulago Hospital, however, has showed interest in an out of court settlement with Musimenta and Mubangizi. Mulago’s legal team declined to comment.

But what Musimenta and Mubangizi ultimately want is the truth about their daughter.

“I’m always thinking about what happened to her. I don’t know whether she was kidnapped,” said Mubangizi.

“There are some people overseas who can’t conceive and they give money to the nurses [to buy the babies].”

According to local reports babies are allegedly stolen from hospitals but there are also claims that some health workers have been mixing up babies, with parents been given the wrong newborns or dead bodies.

The couple say they’ll use the settlement from the hospital towards getting closure. They are unable to afford the services of an investigator to probe the details of their missing child.

“When someone has twins it’s an honorary thing in our tradition, we do dancing and singing to welcome the twins,” said Mubangizi.

“So we’ll go to our village and have a traditional ceremony. If the baby is alive, she will reveal herself.”

Daniel Kisekka (l), aka Survivor and Sharon Bwogi (r), aka Lady Slyke, are presenters on NewzBeat, a Ugandan news programme that raps the news. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Mar 18 2014 (IPS)

“People in Ukraine took over power.

“Celebrated a few days, then the party went sour…” raps Sharon Bwogi, aka Lady Slyke, on NewzBeat, a weekend show that airs on Uganda’s channel NTV in both English and the local language Luganda. 

It might sound strange — hearing a news item on the political situation in Ukraine being rapped. But a new show in this East African nation, where half of its 36.4 million people are below the age of 15 and media censorship restricts the information people receive, hopes to grab the audience’s attention through “rhyme and reason”.

NewzBeat airs on Uganda’s free-to air channel NTV and is recorded in an independent studio in a suburb outside the country’s capital, Kampala. The team records one segment between four and five minutes – which takes about half an hour to film using two cameras, a green screen and a few other pieces of equipment – every week.

Each episode includes a mix of four or five international and local stories and includes a human interest, sport and entertainment piece.

Bwogi co-hosts hosts NewzBeat with Daniel Kisekka, aka Survivor, and the show also features 13-year-old anchor MC Loy. She is still in school but acts as the show’s “special correspondent”, making her one of, if not the youngest, “rapping journalist”.

She recently filed a piece on female boxers in Kampala’s Katanga slum for International Women’s Day. The programme, “borrowed” from hip-hop mad Senegal in West Africa, has only been on air for two weeks in Uganda.

“Right now it’s a mixed bag. Obviously the hip-hop fans are crazy about it but there are people who don’t understand it because hip-hop is not big here, it’s just getting there,” Kisekka, a hip-hop veteran who’s been rapping since 1988, tells IPS.

“[But] it encompasses so many things. It’s informative, it’s entertaining, it’s educational.”

He claims most youth aged under 30 are not interested in news and current affairs.

“It has been like that for such a long time,” says Kisekka. “But hip-hop is very popular with them. When we do a hip-hop show they say ‘I didn’t know this happened’. It’s only because we put it in the language they understand.”

Arnold Ntume, 23, stumbled across NewzBeat while channel surfing and is now a regular viewer.

“I was like ‘oh what’s this?’” the videographer tells IPS.

“It’s a different idea in Uganda. I learn more. And there’s some news that we don’t get on the other stations, mostly stories about our real lives.”

Last May, two privately-owned newspapers and radio stations were shut down by police for 11 days after reporting on a letter, allegedly written by an army general, that claimed that President Yoweri Museveni was grooming his son to succeed him.

According to the Press Freedom Index Report 2013, released by the Human Rights Network for Journalists-Uganda earlier this month, space for reporters to operate freely in the country has continued to shrink.

Senior researcher at Human Rights Watch’s Africa division Maria Burnett tells IPS that over the years the organisation has documented and raised concerns about the “ways in which the Ugandan government limits free expression under the dubious guise of keeping public order and security.

“We have documented intimidation and harassment of journalists and station managers, especially those who are critical of the government, present opposing political views, or expose state wrongdoing, such as corruption or failure to investigate crimes outside Kampala.

“Uganda’s media regulatory system has shown clear partisan tendencies on several occasions. This is all very troubling because the bedrock of free speech is the right to criticise those in powerful positions,” Burnett says.

NewzBeat is upfront about not being objective but also stresses, speaking in rap terms, “the street party is the only party we affiliate ourselves with.”

Kisekka says the show aims to cover issues that aren’t predominantly given air time on other stations.

“There are some things that are never covered [in Uganda], like corruption. There are some topics that are off limit but we have to cover them,” he says.

Uganda has been generating international headlines of late, after Museveni signed a draconian anti-gay law and another bill which supposedly criminalised women wearing miniskirts and led to attacks on females across the country.

NewzBeat delved into both issues.

“We talked a little about it [the anti-gay law]. We don’t want to overdo it because we know how people feel about this thing,” says Bwogi.

Other items that have been covered include Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s 90^th birthday, the trouble in Central African Republic and South Sudan, the Sochi Winter Olympics and climate change.

Once the team decides on the editorial lineup, the creative process starts.

“I love it because I’m doing rhyme but I’m telling a story,” Bwogi, who started rapping in 1999, teaches poetry and song writing and is a fashion designer, tells IPS.

“It was what we were already doing but it was just a matter of getting different topics from different countries.”

She says although the news is delivered in hip-hop the audience can still understand it.

“We don’t do it so fast like it’s a race,” says Bwogi.

“People like it, they say it’s something they’ve never seen it before. Some are just getting into it.”

Kisekka says writing the material is often difficult.

“You have to obey the rules of hip-hop. The material has to remain the same. You can’t change the news,” he says.

However, Kisekka says, “I think the process [of writing the script] is better than the end finished product.”

Kisekka says the team hopes to increase its human interest coverage in the future.

“We expect to get sponsors and get more reporters and then expand it to beyond four [minutes], so we can have people who go to northern Uganda [and other places] and get the stories from the people,” he says.

Fox Odoi, a ruling party MP, is one of the petitioners challenging Uganda’s draconian anti-gay law. He is pictured here on Tuesday Mar. 11 just as the petition was filed with Constitutional Court. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Mar 13 2014 (IPS)

Human rights campaigners who filed a recent legal petition against Uganda’s draconian anti-gay law believe that they have a compelling case for its nullification.

“Judges are human beings. But we are pretty sure we have made a compelling case for the nullification of the law and the judges will exercise their judicial minds to the law as presented before them [rather than pay attention to] public sentiments,” Secretary of the Uganda Law Society, Nicholas Opiyo, told IPS.

On Tuesday, Mar. 11, a coalition of campaigners filed a petition with Uganda’s Constitutional Court in Kampala in response to the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014. President Yoweri Museveni signed the bill into law on Feb. 24.

The law strengthens penalties for homosexual acts, prescribing life imprisonment for “aggravated homosexuality” and criminalising the “promotion” of homosexuality. The team is seeking an injunction against the enforcement of the law.

Opiyo, who helped draft the petition, said the legal challenge “raises important constitutional and legal issues that the court must resolve satisfactorily.” The petition was filed under the auspices of the Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law (CSCHRCL), a coalition of 50 indigenous civil society organisations advocating for non-discrimination.

It argues, among other things, that the anti-gay law “violates Ugandans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to: privacy, to be free from discrimination, dignity, to be free from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment…”

The petitioners are also seeking a permanent injunction against media houses or any other organisations from publishing pictures, names, addresses or other details of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual and intersex (LGBTI) or suspected LGBTI persons.

On Feb. 25, just one day after Museveni signed the anti-gay law, Ugandan tabloid Red Pepper published a list of what it said were “Uganda’s 200 top homos”. A string of other sensational headlines in other editions of Red Pepper, and another tabloid Hello, ensued.

Geoffrey Ogwaro of CSCHRCL was named in a Mar. 1 issue of Red Pepper, which carried the front page headline “Ugandan homos form cabinet”. His photo was featured on page two.

Although the activist’s immediate family knowns that he is gay, he said his mum was still “heartbroken” after being shown the paper. “She’s never really come to terms with it and when it became public it was really embarrassing for her,” Ogwaro said. “She’s cooled down now but it was a bit of a shock to her.”

Opiyo said his “conservative guess” was that it could take “about six months” to come up. But he said that even then the public discourse surrounding the law, which is popular with most Ugandans, may “weigh on the minds of the judges.”

“We are under no illusion that this petition is the most popular petition. We know too well that the general public may be adverse to our petition and will seek to vilify the petitioners and their lawyers,” Opiyo said.

Among the petitioners is Fox Odoi, a ruling party MP and former legal advisor to Museveni who is the only legislator to speak out publicly against the law. “I believe it’s irrational, it has no basis, it offends every human right that you can think about, it offends our constitution. It offends our treaty obligations of Uganda,” Odoi told IPS about the anti-gay law.

“As a citizen, as a legislator, as a human rights lawyer, I owe it to the people of Uganda to stand up and challenge it. Of course there’s a big political risk, this society is very homophobic and they’ll brand you all manner of names just because you stood up to speak for the minority. But in life you take a risk even waking up in your bed every day.” “Personally I do not agree that we’re going to lose in the Constitutional Court and the Court of Appeal… We have a good case,” Odoi said.

Fox Odoi, a ruling party MP, is one of the petitioners challenging Uganda’s draconian anti-gay law. He is pictured here on Tuesday Mar. 11 just as the petition was filed with Constitutional Court. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Mar 13 2014 (IPS)

Human rights campaigners who filed a recent legal petition against Uganda’s draconian anti-gay law believe that they have a compelling case for its nullification. 

“Judges are human beings. But we are pretty sure we have made a compelling case for the nullification of the law and the judges will exercise their judicial minds to the law as presented before them [rather than pay attention to] public sentiments,” Secretary of the Uganda Law Society, Nicholas Opiyo, told IPS.“Personally I do not agree that we’re going to lose in the Constitutional Court and the Court of Appeal… We have a good case.” -- Fox Odoi, a ruling party MP and former legal advisor to Museveni

On Tuesday, Mar. 11, a coalition of campaigners filed a petition with Uganda’s Constitutional Court in Kampala in response to the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014. President Yoweri Museveni signed the bill into law on Feb. 24.

The law strengthens penalties for homosexual acts, prescribing life imprisonment for “aggravated homosexuality” and criminalising the “promotion” of homosexuality. The team is seeking an injunction against the enforcement of the law.

Opiyo, who helped draft the petition, said the legal challenge “raises important constitutional and legal issues that the court must resolve satisfactorily.”

The petition was filed under the auspices of the Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law (CSCHRCL), a coalition of 50 indigenous civil society organisations advocating for non-discrimination.

It argues, among other things, that the anti-gay law “violates Ugandans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to: privacy, to be free from discrimination, dignity, to be free from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment…”

The petitioners are also seeking a permanent injunction against media houses or any other organisations from publishing pictures, names, addresses or other details of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual and intersex (LGBTI) or suspected LGBTI persons.

On Feb. 25, just one day after Museveni signed the anti-gay law, Ugandan tabloid Red Pepper published a list of what it said were “Uganda’s 200 top homos”. A string of other sensational headlines in other editions of Red Pepper, and another tabloid Hello, ensued.

Geoffrey Ogwaro of CSCHRCL was named in a Mar. 1 issue of Red Pepper, which carried the front page headline “Ugandan homos form cabinet”. His photo was featured on page two.

Although the activist’s immediate family knowns that he is gay, he said his mum was still “heartbroken” after being shown the paper.

“She’s never really come to terms with it and when it became public it was really embarrassing for her,” Ogwaro said.

“She’s cooled down now but it was a bit of a shock to her.”

Opiyo said his “conservative guess” was that it could take “about six months” to come up. But he said that even then the public discourse surrounding the law, which is popular with most Ugandans, may “weigh on the minds of the judges.”

“We are under no illusion that this petition is the most popular petition. We know too well that the general public may be adverse to our petition and will seek to vilify the petitioners and their lawyers,” Opiyo said.

Among the petitioners is Fox Odoi, a ruling party MP and former legal advisor to Museveni who is the only legislator to speak out publicly against the law.

“I believe it’s irrational, it has no basis, it offends every human right that you can think about, it offends our constitution. It offends our treaty obligations of Uganda,” Odoi told IPS about the anti-gay law.

“As a citizen, as a legislator, as a human rights lawyer, I owe it to the people of Uganda to stand up and challenge it. Of course there’s a big political risk, this society is very homophobic and they’ll brand you all manner of names just because you stood up to speak for the minority. But in life you take a risk even waking up in your bed every day.”

“Personally I do not agree that we’re going to lose in the Constitutional Court and the Court of Appeal… We have a good case,” Odoi said.

Other petitioners include law professor Joe Oloka-Onyango, media personality Andrew Mwenda and former leader of the opposition Professor Morris Ogenga-Latigo.

A number of distinguished gay rights campaigners and Ugandan NGOs Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum (HRAPF) and the Centre for Health, Human Rights and Development (CEHURD) are also named in the petition.

Adrian Jjuuko, executive director of HRAPF, said there had been 10 cases of arrests of LGBTI and suspected LGBTI people since the law was passed by Parliament in December. There were also more than three cases of evictions of tenants by landlords who did not follow due process of the law.

Ugandan activists have vowed for years to challenge the law in court. Campaigners have already notched up two legal victories. In 2011 leading gay rights activist David Kato and two others won a case against now defunct tabloid Rolling Stone, which had called for homosexuals to be hanged. Weeks later Kato was murdered.

In 2008 two lesbians, Yvonne Oyoo and Victor Juliet Mukasa, were awarded 7,800 dollars by a judge who found their rights were violated when the pair was arrested and one of them was undressed by police.

Some activists are hopeful they could win again.

“I think court could work out, it’s usually very objective. It has been very objective in the other two cases that have been won,” Ogwaro of CSCHRCL said.

“However, there are going to be the usual delays because the judges will fear issuing the judgment and how it will be seen.”

The petitioners say that even if the Constitutional Court does not rule in their favour, it is not the end.

“We shall appeal to the Supreme Court. Uganda is [also] a signatory to the law that establishes the East African Community, there is a court and we shall explore that option. We shall keep fighting,” said Odoi.

Uganda’s gays are bracing themselves for a spate of arrests and harassment as the anti-gay bill was signed into on Monday, Feb. 24, 2014. Pictured here are participants of Uganda’s second Gay Pride parade held in August 2013. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Feb 25 2014 (IPS)

Uganda’s gays are bracing themselves for a spate of arrests and harassment as the country’s draconian anti-gay bill was signed into law by President Yoweri Museveni on Monday, Feb. 24.

One gay man from Kamapla told IPS after the signing of the bill that there was nothing that he could do now and “the only thing [left] is to try my best and [leave the country] for a safer place.”

“There’s no one who says I want to become gay, especially here in Uganda. You’re just born with it. You do not choose,” he added.

The new bill, officially named the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, strengthens existing punishments for those caught having gay sex and prescribes jail terms up to life for “aggravated homosexuality” — including sex with a minor or where one partner is HIV positive. The bill also includes the “offence of homosexuality” – this is where a person convicted of homosexuality is liable to life imprisonment.

Human rights lawyer John Francis Onyango, who has represented many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual and intersex (LGBTI) Ugandans, said he had “definitely” seen an increase in arrests of LGBTI people since the bill was passed by parliament on Dec. 20.

“And also many gay persons are living in apprehension about their security, their freedom and capacity to associate,” he told IPS, adding that he was currently representing the LGBTI community in court on a number of cases. Before the signing of the anti-gay bill into law, this East African nation already had some laws against those caught having gay sex.

Museveni defied international condemnation by signing the bill during a packed public ceremony at State House on Feb. 24.

It took many by surprise as Museveni said only late last week that he would put the legislation on hold while he sought advice from U.S. scientists on whether homosexuality is caused by nature or nurture.

But member of parliament Sam Okuonzi, who chairs the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs, told IPS that Museveni had been under “tremendous pressure” from a growing chorus of MPs, religious leaders and locals to sign the bill. “There is nothing that has united this country so completely and so strongly as this bill,” he said.

MP Stanley Omwonya told IPS after Museveni had approved it: “It’s really (about) preserving our culture. We want our people to be morally upright.”

Human rights activists have long vowed to challenge the law in court, arguing that it violates international human rights standards and is unconstitutional. Ugandan gay rights activist and winner of the 2011 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, Frank Mugisha, tweeted: “Signing the anti-gay bill Museveni scores at his own goal post – we shall challenge this law & the old law.”

In another post he said “@YKMusevenii knows we shall over turn this law in the constitutional court & with our determination we wont stop at nothing.”

Onyango said that the “the Anti-Homosexuality Bill also raises broader concerns about mainstream human rights organisations, about their shrinking space for operation of the civil society organisations (CSOs).” According to the bill, if an NGO “promotes homosexuality” then it can be closed and its directors or leaders prosecuted.

In a statement released on Monday, Feb. 24, Human Rights Watch said Museveni had dealt a “dramatic blow to freedom expression and association in Uganda.”

Just over a week ago, U.S. President Barack Obama warned Museveni that enacting the legislation would “complicate our valued relationship with Uganda”. In the past Obama has sent U.S. troops as advisors to Uganda to help the country fight the rebel Lords Resistance Army (LRA) and track down its leader, Joseph Kony. The LRA has been responsible for mass murder, rape and kidnapping in Uganda’s north.

Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, the European Union and South African Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu also released statements or spoke out over the anti-gay bill, with some warning there may be aid cuts if it was brought into force.

According to one report on Feb. 24, Norway and Denmark immediately said they were freezing or diverting aid while Austria said it was reviewing assistance. Canada, the White House and the United Nations released a strong statement condemning the law. The EU said approving the legislation was “draconian” while the United Kingdom said it was “deeply saddened and disappointed”.

Ugandan lawyer and human rights activist Adrian Jjuuko told IPS that the country should brace itself for aid cuts. But he stressed that Uganda needed “sanctions that don’t affect the common person but rather the people passing the law.”

“There are some aspects of aid that could be cut, rather than other aspects of aid. You wouldn’t cut aid that goes to healthcare, you can’t cut aid that goes to education,” said Jjuko, who is the executive director of NGO Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum.

“Maybe in terms of military spending and things like that…if that’s the kind of aid that’s cut, that’s the cut that will be felt because it goes directly to the president, his personal interests and ambitions, rather than the people of Uganda.”

He said that to cut aid over the issue of the anti-gay bill alone would be like turning a blind eye to other human rights violations in Uganda.

“The gay issue is not the only issue in this country,” Jjuuko said. “Seen as a whole issue, Uganda’s human rights record is going down.”

Uganda’s inadequate road infrastructure has been blamed from the increased traffic congestion in the country, especially in the capital, Kampala. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Feb 5 2014 (IPS)

There’s the good: “A slight delay of about a minute.”

The bad: “Terrible jam!!”

And the unbelievable: “No jam.” But as long as Kampala motorists and pedestrians are talking traffic, the eight Ugandan creators of new app called RoadConexion, are happy. For the time being, anyway.

“A problem we have here in Uganda is the roads, the infrastructure is terrible,” Lynn Asiimwe, the lead developer tells IPS.

“This is mainly the effect of bad governance and corruption. The effects are traffic jams, incomplete roads, and potholes everywhere.”

The 25-year-old, who is pursuing a master’s degree in inclusive innovation at the Graduate School of Business in the University of Cape Town, South Africa, works as a software developer with Access Mobile, a mobile technology company.

Asiimwe and her team worked on the app for free “out of passion”. And she hopes that the app, which won the Tech4Governance hackathon, a competition run by a local technology innovation hub called Hive Colab, will make leaders face up to these problems.

In 2010, President Yoweri Museveni promised to launch an investigation into corrupt road builders.

And in 2011 local newspaper, The Independent, stated that according to the Auditor General, money for maintaing road infrastructure was not well spent and that there were “alarming disparities in costs” as well as “shoddy standards, poor and late delivery by numerous contractors.”

But first RoadConexion needs to get people chatting.

The app lets users submit and receive real-time traffic reports on road repairs, accidents and traffic jams on almost any Kampala road featured on Google maps via the internet. Motorists and pedestrians can log into the site using Twitter and Facebook.

“We’re trying to get users engaged in the beginning,” says Asiimwe.

“If people realise that the traffic’s really bad they might start a conversation on their own and this conversation will hold these leaders accountable.

“We’re hoping that the officials will actually start doing something, start caring, actually start using the money in the right way.”

In Kampala bodabodas (motorbike taxis), matatus (mini-buses), cars, trucks and bicycles all jostle for road space.

According to local newspaper, the Monitor, there were 16,765 reported road accidents in Uganda in 2012, leaving thousands dead and hundreds maimed.

Asiimwe believes that corruption has led to “under-qualified companies taking on road works which leads to [sub-standard] work being done.”

“These roads tend to degrade in a few months leading to potholes and other forms of degradation. This degradation can’t handle the level of traffic, which results in traffic jams.”

According to a World Bank policy research document titled “Uganda’s Infrastructure: A Continental Perspective” providing the money and resource for road maintenance here “remains a challenge” with further investment needed to improve road safety.

Asiimwe adds: “These companies doing [sub-standard] road work need to be held accountable and we are trying to achieve that with RoadConexion.”

One bad example is a patch of road near Makerere University in central Kampala, where work was supposed to be completed by an international contractor by October last year but is yet to even commence.

“They already have the big banner up there saying who the contractor is, what they’re doing, how long the work is supposed to be for,” Asiimwe says.

“But when we got in touch they said ‘oh, we got into a few difficulties, funding didn’t come through on time’.

“The road is really dusty, the potholes are still there, but no one is letting the users know what’s going on.”

Currently RoadConexion receives between 50 to 100 views daily through computers and mobile phones, with most users checking in before the morning rush.

“Most people want to view, but few want to submit,” says Asiimwe.

“I’m realising that in Uganda we’re used to consuming, we’re not used to this mentality of sourcing,” Asiimwe says.

The development of RoadConexion follows the 2012 launch of Ma3Route, an app for Kenyan users. The mobile, web and SMS platform crowd-sources transport data and provides Nairobi road users with information on traffic, directions and driving reports.

“My desire to build a tool to help commuters in developing countries was further strengthened after I bought my first car once I got my first job and witnessed first-hand all the hours drivers waste in sometimes avoidable traffic due to lack of information,” creator Laban Okune tells IPS.

Okune, who grew up in Butere, a town in Kenya’s Western Province and went to Nairobi to study computer engineering, resolved to build a “triple threat tool” addressing traffic, directions, and reckless driving challenges faced by commuters in developing countries.

“The final straw was the road carnage witnessed in Kenya. Public transport vehicles traverse the roads, stuffed with people, swerve and overlap recklessly, causing them to roll off the road and spill passengers onto the ground.

“We lose so many lives.”

At least 2,000 in the space of nine months alone, according to one newspaper report.

Ma3Route users can receive directions and alerts on specific roads, report bad driving and even search number plates before they board a bus to check a driver’s track record.

Okune hopes to expand to other parts of Kenya. Ma3Route also has its sights set on Kampala and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

Fexlix Odongkara, director of the Automobile Association of Uganda, believes that traffic apps could be a good alternative to traffic reports on the morning and evening radio stations.

“Traffic jams in Uganda are getting worse. I’ve lived in this city for more than 30 years and every year it gets worse,” he tells IPS.

“The roads are not expanding in relation to the [increased number of] cars and the people. Apart from the small matatus and the bodabodas, there’s no public transport. Families bring all the cars into town.”

He said the only shortcoming of apps like RoadConexion will be that many people don’t have access to the internet at home or even in their offices. And if they do, some may not want to report traffic conditions because they may have already reported accidents to the police and are treated like suspects.

The World Bank has forecast traffic-related deaths will increase by 80 percent by 2020.

Odongkara says the biggest problem when it comes to Uganda’s roads is that too many people don’t know how to drive properly.

There are thousands of miles between Chanyanya Rural Health Clinic, a basic medical centre in Zambia’s rural Kafue District with no resident doctors despite being the main centre for nearly 12,000 people, and the New York University (NYU) Teaching Hospital, one of the world’s most prestigious medical schools.

Mercy Nalwamba, the clinical officer general of Makeni clinic in Chilanga District. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

The two are worlds apart, not only when it comes to geography.

Yet when Florence* broke out in a strange rash two weeks after she began taking ARVs for HIV in 2011, the clinic, about 90 minutes from the capital Lusaka, was able to connect to a NYU infectious diseases expert on the other side of the world with just a few clicks of a computer mouse.

Through the Virtual Doctor Project (VDP), a telemedicine initiative being pioneered in Zambia linking rural clinics across the southern African country with volunteer doctors around the globe using the local broadband network, Florence was prescribed the correct medication.

Her rash had been “all over the body”, recalled Kebby Mulongo, the clinical officer who first saw her.

“It was just about two days in between [when] the doctor [in New York] was able to get back to me. The expert in New York knew what the problem was ASAP,” Mulongo, 30, told IPS.

“And that’s what I was happy about, because after that I kept on treating the patient in the ward. Within a week or so the patient improved instead of me sending the patient to the hospital.”

A smiling Mulongo added: “Medicine is about consultation. If we can consult at the click of a button like that, it’s better for us.”

The VDP, now running live in six Zambian sites, use eHealth Opinion software to submit patient files electronically. Clinical officers, trained to screen patients before they see a doctor, access this using Fizzbook laptops. The dust-proof, splash-proof, robust laptops can be easily transported and a battery backup means they can withstand Zambia’s power cuts.

The software allows the clinical officers to build a patient file which is compressed and sent to one of the VDP’s medical experts in Zambia, the UK, U.S., India, Pakistan, China, Nigeria, New Zealand or Malaysia. The file includes the patient’s basic details, medical history, prescription and the specific questions the Zambian clinical officers need answered.

All clinical officers are given a basic Samsung HD camera with which they can take photos of X-rays. These can be uploaded to the computer and included in the patient file along with lab reports. The “virtual doctor” then reviews the information they’ve received and offers diagnostic and treatment advice with another click of a button.

Operational in Zambia for six months, the VDP, set up by an eponymous charity, are due to go live at three more sites this month. They hope to have at least 12 sites live by the end of the year. They’re also looking at expanding into Tanzania in the near future, along with other African countries.

Just before Christmas four new clinical officers were trained in Zambia’s new Chilanga District.

“Effectively it’s a platform for you to be able to talk to somebody else about a patient that maybe you’re not too sure on. The idea is not to take any responsibility for ownership away from you,” project co-ordinator Heather Ashcroft told the trainees.

“You still are and you remain the first port of call, you have the final say on how you diagnose or treat a patient. The idea behind the system is that you get a bit of a sounding board.”

Mercy Nalwamba, 22, was one of two female clinical officers who attended the Dec. 23 training session. A recent graduate of Chianama College of health sciences, she is now the clinical officer general of Makeni clinic in Chilanga District and sees about 50 patients daily, the majority of them suffering from respiratory tract infection, diarrhoea and malaria.

Nalwamba said having access to the VDP experts at Makeni would mean the clinic would have to make less referrals to other centres further away for nonemergency cases, the project’s main aim. But she told IPS, “I can’t wait to hear their opinions and new ideas. It will enhance my work, I’ll gain more experience and knowledge.

“I think there will be less work and we’ll be getting more information on how to go about (treating) chronically ill patients, how to manage them and when we’re referring them we can at least make the patients a little bit stable.”

Ashcroft says the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed with Zambia’s Ministry of Health (MoH) states that VDP will provide the equipment, training and software for free for the first 12 months, giving the system time to “bed in and have a positive impact on the clinic’s referral rates”. The government is supporting them in motivating and encouraging health staff to use it.

“Following this, we will continue to support the clinical officers, however, a small surcharge will be made to ensure that the system can be upgraded and maintained in the health centres,” Ashcroft told IPS. “All equipment, and licenses for donations is provided by charitable donations, so our aim is to equip the clinics with everything they need for the service to become a self-sustaining, yet integral part of the day-to-day running of the health centres.” The charity is one of the increasing number of NGOs accepting Bitcoin donations.

Andrew Phiri from the MoH is confident the government will be able to support VDP after its first year, stressing it’s a much-needed project.

“We’ve got a lot of people living in rural areas, they have to walk long distances (to clinics). We don’t have a lot of ambulances. You find that our health facilities are not closely linked, they are huge distances apart,” Phiri told IPS.

“Through consultation you are going to give the best quality of care that the patient requires. It will be a very good outcome because, really, in medicine you need to consult, you cannot work alone.”

Zambian trader Dorothy Chisa sells caterpillars, a popular high-protein delicacy in the southern African country. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
LUSAKA, Dec 17 2013 (IPS)

It is known as the land of copper to the outside world, but there’s another c-word that does a roaring trade in Zambia, albeit locally – caterpillars.

On a street corner in the capital Lusaka on a scorching hot day, Dorothy Chisa, 49, is selling the insects, a popular high-protein delicacy in the southern African country. They come raw in different sized pots starting at five Zambian Kwacha (less than one dollar)."They come from other countries like Malawi, Zimbabwe, even South Africa to buy [the caterpillars]." -- Chris Siame

“[People] like them very much. They taste very nice, like fish meat. They have vitamins. You pound them and you make a porridge for babies,” the married mother of seven, who can earn 600 Kwacha a day selling caterpillars, tells IPS.

Found on the Mopane tree in Zambia’s north, the insects are called ‘Ifishimu’ in Bemba or ‘Ifinkubala’ in the Chewa language heard in the country’s east. The thorns on the black type are more visible than the brown, which vary in size.

After locals pick the living insects from the trees with their bare hands, the creatures are squeezed to discharge the leaves they’ve consumed and put on low heat to roast. In the sweltering Zambian weather, they normally dry within two days.

Locals mix them with nshima, a cornmeal dish and a staple in Zambia, as a snack with tomato and onion on top, and add them to stews. One Lusaka restaurant serves the insects, and at least one safari lodge at Victoria Falls, on the border with Zimbabwe, has them available to tempt mzungus (‘whites’).

Locals flock to the north from Lusaka and other parts of Zambia to buy them in bulk, selling the caterpillars across the country, all year round. This year, attendance in Northern Province schools dropped by more than 70 percent at one stage as students abandoned their lessons to catch the insects, a Zambian newspaper reported last month.

Demand by businessmen and women from urban areas is reported to have pushed up their price, with Kitwe and Lusaka residents camping in villages to snap them up. It was also claimed parents were forcing children to sell caterpillars.

According to a study published in May by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), entomophagy – the consumption of insects by humans – supplement the diets of approximately two billion people.

More than 1,900 species, found mostly in tropical countries, are edible. Given their high nutritional value, low emissions of greenhouse gases, low requirements for land and the high efficiency at which they convert feed into food, insects can contribute to food security and help with protein shortages, the report said.

In West Africa, the sheanut caterpillar is consumed, while the sapelli is lapped up in Central Africa (the species are the same as the Mopane but they feed off different trees).

“After buying from us they distribute in other provinces,” Chris Siame, surrounded by tall bags of caterpillars he bought in October and is now selling at bustling Soweto Market in Lusaka, tells IPS. “Some, they come from other countries like Malawi, Zimbabwe, even South Africa to buy them.”

In South Africa, the caterpillars are on the menu of one Johannesburg restaurant.

Siame, 32, makes the journey of about 900 km to the north annually for three weeks to buy the insects.

“We use the barter system. You give them [traders] clothes,” he explains. “If they don’t want it, you just give them cash.”

He purchased two-kg bags of caterpillars for 40 Kwacha (less than a dollar) each. After trucking them back to Lusaka he’s now selling them for 60 Kwacha a bag.

“They taste like an egg yolk. I like them so much,” Siame says.

Their nutritional value is a bonus. According to the FAO, every 100 grammes of dried caterpillars contain about 53 grammes of protein, about 15 percent fat and about 17 percent carbohydrates. The insects are believed to have a higher proportion of protein and fat than beef and fish.

They’re also rich in potassium, calcium, magnesium, zinc, phosphorus and iron, among other vitamins and minerals.

“When we go for antenatals, we’re advised to eat them,” another seller, breastfeeding a baby at Soweto Market, tells IPS.

Dr. Francis Mupeta, the secretary general of Resident Doctors in Zambia, says he sees locals eating caterpillars in his professional and personal life.

“My wife is pregnant and trust me she has cravings for finkubala! That’s the reason we had to buy three months’ stock,” he tells IPS.

“I strongly advise pregnant women to eat finkubala. They improve their appetite, reduce nausea and contribute to their overall nutritional status,” Mupeta adds, noting that they are relatively cheap and readily available in rural areas.

Paul Vantomme, senior forestry officer at FAO, says there are three steps policy makers in Zambia’s food and health sectors can take to ensure future generations have access to the food.

“First, acknowledge that insects are part of the diet and help enrich these diets with valuable proteins,” he tells IPS.

“Secondly, provide institutional and legal support to ensure that caterpillars brought to the market are safe to eat for the consumers [and make sure] food inspections cover the quality of insects, just as this is done for meat, fish, milk etc.

“Thirdly, promote a sustainable supply,” he said.

According to FAO, commercalisation of the Mopane caterpillar has led to intense pressure to overharvest, resulting in unsustainable use. Since the 1990s, Mopane populations have waned, with poverty, food insecurity and environmental disasters making things worse.

Vantomme said levels of harvesting should be monitored. New Mopane trees could be planted to increase numbers.

The Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA) line has about 900,000 passengers who use the railway annually. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
DAR ES SALAAM, Dec 11 2013 (IPS)

Some say it’s the journey, not the destination that matters. Hop aboard the Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA) line at Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam port and begin the 1,860-kilometre journey to Kapiri Mposhi, a small town in Zambia’s Central Province, and you may find yourself pondering this adage.

For a large number of passengers using what is known as the “Freedom” or “Great Uhuru Railway”, it is about getting from point A to point B safely. The railway line is a necessity today, given that some roads in southeastern Tanzania are poor, impassable or nonexistent.

“Try and travel on those buses … You’ll pray you arrive,” Lawrence Pangani, a pension scheme manager who is listening to music on his portable stereo, tells IPS.

Pangani, along with a number of Zambian and Congolese businessmen, are travelling in TAZARA’s first class cabin as the train crosses the Rift Valley. He is making his way from Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam, where he was working, to his home in Kabwe, which lies west of Zambia’s capital Lusaka.

The railway was built in the 1970s with an interest-free loan of about 412 million dollars from China. At the time, it was the largest single foreign-aid project undertaken by the Asian country. TAZARA was handed over to Tanzania and Zambia in 1976.

It became a significant alternative transport system for Zambia, a copper-rich but landlocked southern African state which, at the time, was sanctioned by still-colonised neighbouring regimes for supporting the liberation struggle of many of those countries.

But in recent times TAZARA has veered off track. Just over five years ago the railway was said to be “on the brink of collapse” after accumulating debts of up to 45 million dollars.

In 2011 China, described by TAZARA spokesman Conrad Simuchile as the railway’s “surrogate mother”, signed a protocol with the Zambian and Tanzanian governments, writing off roughly 50 percent of their debts. Simuchile tells IPS that most of the support for TAZARA, in the form of equipment and expertise, has come from China. He stresses that there are no conditions attached to the assistance.

But even with this help, the railway is still struggling.

In September it was reported that revenue had averaged 1.53 million dollars per month against an estimated average expenditure of over 2.5 million dollars.

A two-week strike, which began in August over the unpaid wages of 1,067 workers, cost TAZARA 1.4 million dollars and inconvenienced 46,000 passengers.

The company desperately needs recapitalisation, says Simuchile.

“We are doing so badly right now. But this is not a write-off. This company, TAZARA, is not a perpetual loss-making company [as some places have dismissed it],”  he says from his office at the railway’s Dar es Salaam headquarters.

“All we need is just maybe three or four major customers and this company will break even, make a profit. And we have clients knocking on our doors everyday. They want us to move their cargo.”

He says government ministers have recently given the company leeway to look for smart partnerships with the private sector without necessarily affecting the shareholding structure.

Simuchile is optimistic the line will be extended to Lusaka in the next two years.

“It’s very convenient for our customers but [we are not just transporting] minerals – copper, cobalt, manganese. We are also moving a lot of imports from Asia, from all over the world. They come in through Dar es Salaam and they go on to Malawi, Congo, Zambia, and the Great Lakes countries of Burundi and Rwanda.”

Nelson Nyangu, director of transport in Zambia’s ministry of transport, works, supply and communication, says TAZARA is a “lifeline” for Zambia and its operations must be “immediately revitalised”.

“At present the authority is experiencing serious operational and management challenges that have resulted in the company operating below break-even point,” he tells IPS.

TAZARA’s hauling capacity has gone down from a peak of over one million mega tonnes per year to less than 500,000, Nyangu says.

However, there are still about 900,000 passengers who use the railway annually.

Today, farmer Emmanuel* is transporting his rice to sell at the local market in Makambako, a town in Tanzania’s southern highlands. A super-seater ticket cost him about nine dollars, compared to a bus ticket that costs nearly 25 dollars and involves three changes.

TAZARA runs two passenger services a week. The one that departs Zambia on Tuesdays is called the “Mukuba Express”, mukuba meaning “copper” in the country’s Bemba language. The Friday service from Tanzania is called “Kilimanjaro”.

Today’s Kilimanjaro service left Dar es Salaam nearly 10 hours late and is failing to make up time.

“I was supposed to pass through this place at night. Now it’s daytime, meaning my schedule has been delayed,” says Emmanuel, speaking in Swahili through an interpreter.

Simuchile admits there are “breakdowns on a weekly basis”.

“Our infrastructure is really rundown,” he says. “Our equipment itself, the locomotive, the wagons they’ve really aged and maintenance schedules have not been followed because of the serious lack of recapitalisation.”

But Simuchile points out, “it’s the unexpected things that happen that really are interesting.”

“The things you experience on TAZARA are the real life experiences Africans have on a daily basis. The hiccups you face are part of the reality,” he says. “So the important thing is to get on TAZARA with an open mind.” And an open schedule.

But for some foreign passengers who are travelling on a train in Africa for the first time, these “hiccups” may be what is most exciting about the trip.

Sara Strandstoft, her partner Jacob Anderson, and their two boys travelling on TAZARA. After three days on board, the Danish family still does not know when they will reach their final destination of Kasama, in Zambia’s Northern Province.

“We took our watches off, time goes as it goes,” Strandstoft tells IPS, laughing.

*Not his real name.

Regina Mukiibi Mugongo is Uganda’s first ever funeral director. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Nov 28 2013 (IPS)

Uganda may have the third-highest fertility rate in the world but where there is life, death is inevitable. And it is a certainty that Regina Mukiibi Mugongo made the most of when she became this East African nation’s first ever funeral director almost two decades ago.

But in a country where a large proportion of the population associates conventional burials with witchcraft, establishing her company, Funeral Services Ltd (UFS), was not easy.

“I met with a lot of resistance, people were talking about being haunted by ghosts,” Mugongo, who has overseen thousands of burials, including many for state, religious, royal and diplomatic figures, tells IPS.

“They said ‘Oh what’s this? It is taboo, how can you bring in such a service?’ People were fighting against me,” says Mugongo."When you are a woman and you go to that bank to ask for a loan … they ask you where is your husband to help sign on the document too.” -- Monica Malega, policy and advocacy officer of UWEAL

Initially, she left a 15-year career with the former Uganda Commercial Bank to start a travel company with her late brother Freddie.

It was during their travels that they saw the services offered by established western funeral companies and the siblings realised there was a gap in the Ugandan market. They set up UFS in 1997 but Freddie passed away a year after starting the company. Mugongo has run it on her own ever since.

She now employs 35 staff members and has five branches across Uganda. And UFS is also the sole local company with membership in the organisation of funeral directors in the Great Lakes region.

Three trophies sit on a shelf behind her desk at the UFS offices. Last year, she won the Uganda Women Entrepreneurs Associated Limited (UWEAL) Business Achievers Awards. This October she was given  the 2013 Phenomenal Women Trailblazers funeral services award by the U.S.-based 100 Black Women of Funeral Service.

UFS imports caskets from the U.S. – about 125 annually – and also makes “dignified” coffins and caskets locally in its carpentry workshop.

“The demand [for locally-made coffins] is higher since they are more affordable. We decorate them with imported ornaments and interior linen.”

Mugongo was fortunate in obtaining the 176,000-dollar informal loan from a local bank to start UFS. Both her good track record as a banker and her diploma in business studies played a role in her accessing the funds and she paid it off six years later.

But in Uganda, other women are not as fortunate. UWEAL, which has 750 registered members in 10 districts across the country, claim up to 48 percent of the country’s businesses could be female-owned.

According to Monica Malega, the body’s policy and advocacy officer, 60 percent of UWEAL’s members work in agriculture.

She says that while women are quicker at making a decision to start a business than the opposite sex, they face more struggles, with a lack of ownership of land being their number one challenge.

“For example, you can get some land for a year but you may not be sure if you can use it the year after because probably your husband will say he needs it but you’ve planned an investment of five years,” Malega tells IPS.

“And when you are a woman and you go to the bank to ask for a loan … they ask you where is your husband to sign the document too.”

From her time as a banker Mugongo has come to the conclusion that women are better at handling money than men.

“Men might be willing to service the loans but they have many problems, they find themselves diverting the money for other purposes,” says Mugongo.

“We women don’t own properties, so we get power of attorney from our husbands or friends. We mortgage other people’s properties. So you feel that conviction, that once I fail to fulfill my obligation someone’s property will be taken. Women fear misusing bank loans,” she says.

However, the Uganda Investment Authority (UIA), a semi-autonomous government agency, is currently in the process of trying to change this.

“The UIA is finalising establishing a desk at Uganda Development Bank (UDB) to help groups of women have access to finance,” UIA senior investment executive Stephen Byaruhanga Rwaheru tells IPS.

“The barrier is that our commercial bank’s lending rates are still high [25 to 30 percent] and it is difficult for women’s associations to borrow money from such banks,” he says, adding that lending rates should be below 10 percent per annum.

Meanwhile, Mugongo is optimistic about the future of Uganda’s female entrepreneurs.

“I believe we can all be successful when we are innovators.”