Worldwide, suicide remains a major public health challenge, with a disproportionate burden in low- and middle-income countries. Despite growing evidence on suicidal behavior in Uganda, little is known about how community stakeholders perceive its burden, drivers and opportunities for prevention in rural settings. We aimed to explore stakeholders’ perspectives on suicidal behavior, its perceived drivers and opportunities for suicide prevention in Ntungamo District, southwestern Uganda. We conducted a qualitative study involving 19 face-to-face in-depth interviews and three focus group discussions with purposively selected stakeholders. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analyzed using rapid qualitative thematic analysis. Three themes emerged: (1) suicidal behavior was perceived as an increasingly visible community and public health concern; (2) participants identified interacting drivers of suicidal behavior, including access to lethal means, socioeconomic adversity, demographic vulnerabilities, and harmful alcohol and substance use; (3) participants identified community-informed opportunities for suicide prevention and to promote awareness, reduce stigma and encourage early help-seeking. Stakeholders perceived suicidal behavior as a significant community concern driven by interacting social, economic, demographic and environmental influences. Community-informed suicide prevention strategies that strengthen existing community structures and trusted local actors could inform policy and practice in Uganda and similar rural settings across sub-Saharan Africa.

Coordinated, multicomponent care models improve outcomes in early psychosis in high-income settings, but how coordinated care can be adapted for rural, pluralistic, low-resource systems remains poorly understood. We aimed to co-design a locally feasible coordinated care model for people with severe mental illness (SMI) in rural Uganda and identify feasible delivery agents, role divisions, engagement with pluralistic care pathways, and anticipated implementation barriers. We conducted three iterative co-design workshops with 18 participants across parallel churchand mosque-based series in Buyende District, Uganda. Participants included biomedical and mental health workers, Village Health Team members, religious leaders, traditional healers, local leaders, people with lived experience of SMI, and caregivers. Transcripts were translated and analyzed using the Framework Method. Four themes emerged. Participants described sequential help-seeking across a pluralistic care landscape with directional referral asymmetries. They proposed distributing psychosocial support and medication follow-up across a tiered workforce, with relational trust as a key feasibility condition. Reintegration was framed through administrative endorsement and community economic institutions. Family psychoeducation was viewed as foundational and deliverable through task-shifting and peer caregivermentorship. Participants articulated a coordinated care model preserving core functions while redesigning delivery around a community-extended, task-shared workforce.

This article examines the constitutional and human rights implications of mandatory pregnancy testing in Ugandan schools. Using a doctrinal legal approach, it analyses the practice through the lens of Uganda’s 1995 Constitution, regional and international human rights instruments, as well as relevant case law. The article argues that mandatory pregnancy testing and the expulsion of pregnant students infringe on the rights to privacy, non-discrimination, dignity and education. It further maintains that the gendered nature of the practices systematically targets girls, reinforcing harmful cultural norms and institutionalizing educational exclusion. Through a comparative analysis of jurisprudence from East, West and southern Africa, the article demonstrates that such practices fail to meet constitutional standards. It concludes by calling for the abolition of mandatory pregnancy testing, the adoption of inclusive policies that support pregnant learners and the urgent need for legal reforms to align Uganda’s education system with its human rights obligations.

This study examines how risk aversion, drought shocks, and land tenure correlate with the uptake of climate-smart agricultural (CSA) innovations in Uganda. Using survey data (442 households and 927 plots) from two districts (Mubende and Alebtong), farm-level weather data, and experimental and subjective risk aversion measures, the study finds risk aversion to be positively associated with recent drought shocks but negatively correlated with private land tenure. Risk aversion is associated with more land allocated to CSA, but recent drought shocks reduce adoption. Risk-averse farmers prioritize plots with secure land tenure for CSA investments. Promoting CSA practices that align with farmers’ risk-averse tendencies, ensuring protection against drought shocks, and strengthening tenure security can help sustain adoption.

How do traditional authorities with limited resources endure in modern Africa? This article explores the case of the Bunyoro Kitara Kingdom (BKK) in western Uganda, one of Africa’s oldest kingdoms, and how the BKK navigates constraints that limit its access to state-controlled resources. Based on 52 interviews and 4 focus group discussions conducted between 2017 and 2021, this study argues that, rather than relying on pre-existing legitimacy, the BKK seeks to construct legitimacy by cultivating public loyalty and popular support grounded in shared historical memory and collective aspirations. In the context of economic transformation driven by oil development, the BKK draws on narratives of colonial injustice and appeals to future opportunities to overcome its structural fragility and foster solidarity. This mobilisation of popular resources serves as a crucial tool to negotiate the kingdom’s position in national politics and claim a stake in extraction benefits, even in the absence of formal power or territorial control.

Attitude change is not solely an individual process—it unfolds within social networks. While interventions to shift individuals’ political attitudes are widespread, from campaign persuasion to efforts reducing prejudice and partisan animosity, little is known about how such interventions depend on and interact with social structures. We report results from a field experiment in sixteen Ugandan villages that provides a rare, direct view of how attitude change occurs within social networks. We combine measures of village social networks with surveys of attitudes before and after a perspective-taking intervention seeking to warm attitudes toward nearby refugees. Targeted individuals did exhibit warmer attitudes toward refugees immediately after treatment on average. Two to three weeks later, however, substantial additional change had occurred throughout the villages—even among those never treated directly. We show evidence that these attitude shifts occurred within and because of social networks. Attitudes of network neighbors moved toward one another, even more than would be expected by common positive shifts. The new attitudes of targeted individuals spill over to influence the attitudes of network neighbors. Some people react to the intervention especially strongly right away; network distance to these people predicts longer-term attitude change, where attitudes of individuals closer to strong positive or negative reactors shift in the corresponding direction over time. These patterns do not predict immediate responses, only later ones after people have had time to interact with their network ties. Our findings demonstrate that political attitude change is ultimately shaped by real-world social networks.

This paper analyzes the use of rubu unpaid “traditional” labor in Toro District in western Uganda during the colonial period. It explores how the “traditional” roots of the unpaid labor system were negotiated and reinterpreted by African elites through their attempts to gain more control over the labor through wrangling over exemptions and commutations for the work which, then, shaped British responses to the forced labor regime. Chiefs managed rubu labor on the ground and wielded a lot of exploitative power. However, the British administration used intermediaries, luwalo inspectors, to monitor rubu labor and delimit the power of chiefs. This paper also investigates the growth of commutations from so-called traditional labor as a colonial revenue generator.

Despite the growing global burden of mental health conditions, nationally representative data in low- and middle-income countries remain limited. Using data from the 2024 Uganda National Population and Housing Census, this study examined the prevalence and distribution of probable mental health conditions among persons aged 10 years and older in Uganda, while assessing variations by sex, place of residence and sub-region. We conducted a descriptive secondary analysis of publicly available census tabulations (2024 Volume I, Section 6.5). The analytic population comprised 31,389,721 individuals aged 10 years and older. Mental health outcomes were based on self-reported symptoms synthesised by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics into six indicators of probable mental health conditions, such as general psychological distress, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, psychosis and suicidality, rather than clinical diagnoses. Among persons aged 10 years and older, 3,773,915 (12.0%) reported probable general psychological distress. Probable depressive condition affected 2,444,272 (7.8%), followed by probable bipolar condition 1,262,088 (4.0%) and probable anxiety condition 1,201,182 (3.8%). Higher prevalence was observed among females and rural residents. Substantial sub-regional variation was observed across all outcomes, with the prevalence of general psychological distress ranging from ~8% in Madi, Sebei and Ankole to over 16% in Teso. The 2024 census suggests a substantial and uneven distribution of probable mental health conditions in Uganda and underscores the need for geographically targeted, equity-oriented mental health strategies, as well as stronger integration of mental health into primary healthcare systems.

This paper investigates the frequency of commentary pragmatic markers in Ghanaian and Ugandan Englishes, and their use across different text categories, using the Ghanaian and Ugandan components of the International Corpus of English. These markers, which are grouped into assessment, emphasis, evidential, hearsay and manner-of-speaking markers, are explored from a variational pragmatic approach. The results show that Ghanaian English users employ an overall higher frequency of commentary pragmatic markers than Ugandan English users. Ghanaian English users utilise more commentary pragmatic markers in private and public dialogues and printed writing than Ugandan English users, while the latter employ more commentary pragmatic markers in monologues than their Ghanaian English counterparts. The study confirms the influence of local African languages and cultures on the use of some English commentary pragmatic markers, thus contributing to the research on nativisation and pragmatic variation in these varieties.

In a posthumous publication in 1954, seven years after his death, Reuben Anywar became the second Acholi to publish a book. Acoli ki Ker Megi was released one year after Lacito Okech’s Tekwaro ki Ker Lobo Acholi. Unlike Okech, who received little education, Anywar was among the first northern Ugandan graduates of Makerere College. He became one of the first Black teachers at the prestigious Gulu High School and was the founder and original editor of Acholi Magazine. By the mid-1940s, Anywar was arguably the most towering intellectual in northern Uganda. Yet, existing works overlook his significance in knowledge production. This article seeks to rectify this oversight.

What does the institutionalisation of a protest movement into an opposition party in an electoral autocracy mean for its members? This article examines this question by analysing the conversion of People Power, a political pressure group in Uganda, into the National Unity Platform (NUP), focusing on the dilemmas of organisation, strategy and identity. NUP sought to broaden and institutionalise People Power’s activities to be seen as a credible party capable of holding state power. Simultaneously, its initial political weight was closely tied to the defiant, extra-parliamentary energy of the grassroots – a resource the party needed to preserve. These tensions were intensified by Uganda’s authoritarian context, where state repression and demobilisation intersected with uneven access to resources and patronage, producing frictions between privileged actors and grassroots members. The paper shows how these dilemmas generated frustrations among bottom-up constituencies and highlights the importance of examining intra-party processes from a grassroots perspective.

Free community pet clinics (FCPCs) are instrumental in providing healthcare services for pets in resource-constrained communities. These programmes are typically single-day and coupled with limited opportunity for post-operative follow-up, the likelihood of compromise on the welfare of the sterilised pets becomes apparent. The objective of this study was to identify welfare and ethical challenges associated with dog sterilisation clinics conducted in Kampala Metropolitan Area, Uganda, from May to October 2023. We evaluated the welfare of 46 dogs sterilised at the FCPCs. We collected data using a questionnaire combined with observations and checklists at all stages, including arrival, pre-surgical evaluation, post-surgical recovery, and follow-ups at 7 and 30 days post-surgery. Dogs transported to the clinics by motorcycle moved the longest distance (9.5 km; range: 7.2–11 km), followed by those brought by car (3.8 km; range 3.8–4 km) and lastly by walking (2.0 km; 1–3 km). During the pre-surgical waiting period and post-surgical recovery, 91.3 and 63.0% of dogs, respectively, did not receive any provisions. The Animal Welfare Assessment Grid (AWAG) tool evaluated the impact of physical, psychological, and procedural factors on dog welfare and revealed that procedural events had the most negative impact. In the follow-up, one week post-surgery, a significant percentage of dogs were healing normally (73.7%) while infection at the surgical site was reported in 15.4%. Assessing the behavioural change of dogs by 30 days post-operatively, 46.4% reportedly had increased aggression levels. These findings highlight crucial welfare and stress control points for dogs sterilised at free community clinics, which may influence the outcome of the surgery and later interactions with healthcare professionals.

This work explores the travels of Ugandan Enoch Olinga, as an example of a person who enjoyed connections with global minorities across national boundaries and as a unique lens into the Black international experience in the mid-twentieth century. I examine his internationalist experiences through the lens of emotions to emphasize different dynamics of global racial identities and transnational diasporic connections during the 1950s–1970s, an era of decolonization and civil rights movements. I argue that Olinga, a prominent Baha’i who traveled worldwide during this era, advocated for unification among global minorities by emphasizing common racial and cultural heritages and expansive concepts of a politicized kinship. Through the Baha’i Cause, he articulated his own ideas about striving for global harmony and racial unity, with a connection to Africa serving as the linchpin. Emotional analysis provides insights into how Olinga invoked diverse notions of family and kin to arouse particular emotions amongst people of color both within and beyond the unity offered by the Baha’i Faith.

The diffusion of agricultural technologies, such as biofortified crops, is often non-linear, characterised by adoption, discontinuation, and re-adoption. This study examines the factors shaping these dynamic patterns for high-iron beans (HIBs) in Uganda. Based on cross-sectional survey data, we employed a multinomial logit model to categorise and analyse farmer adoption status. The results reveal that a combination of socio-economic and institutional factors significantly influences adoption behaviour. Specifically, the gender and age of the household head, as well as participation in off-farm income, were key socio-economic predictors. Regarding institutional factors, access to reliable markets and the presence of payback schemes emerged as the primary drivers. These findings suggest that overcoming adoption barriers requires addressing both the demographics of farmers and systemic constraints. We recommend a strategic pivot towards decentralising seed production by establishing certified community seed enterprises and enhancing training programmes that focus on both agronomic practices and market linkages to ensure the sustained cultivation of HIBs.