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Uganda
Academy Profile
Makerere University
Regional Academy
Established October 31, 2002
Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, is the site of the first women-oriented education facility in the country. The facility, the Gender Studies Department, was a product of the 3rd World Conference for women that took place in Nairobi in 1985. Now, the Gender Studies Department is at the forefront of academic initiatives to address gender and development issues from an African perspective. It offers a unique program designed to give students an understanding of gender studies and to encourage women to advance their academic careers. Its goal is to contribute to development in Uganda by ensuring that gender is an integral part of the development process.
"The Gender Studies Department was established to provide intelligential leadership for mainstreaming gender to aspects of economic, political, and socio-cultural development," says Mrs. Peace Mutuwa, an instructor in the Gender Studies Department. The three-year undergraduate program runs on a semester system and follows the Major/Minor structure similar to that of the Sociology and Political Science Departments. As of October 1999, the Department had graduated more than 75 Masters students, who now serve in a variety of fields within Uganda. The original intake target of 15 Masters students per year has been increased to 30 as a result of increased demand. Due to repeated enquiries, the Department is currently establishing criteria and guidelines for the admittance for people who wish to pursue a PhD.
Much of the program's success is attributed to its excellent instructors. The head of the department, Professor Victoria Mwaka, helped recruit instructors to teach classes on gender and economics. The courses integrate multi-disciplinary fields, each combining gender studies with a specific concentration, such as gender and human rights, and gender and economics. In October 2002, the Cisco Networking Program was added to the course offerings through a partnership between ITU and Cisco Systems. Adding this technical curriculum puts IT into a more rounded perspective, and proves that it is a field in which women can be successful. As Mutuwa explains, "The Gender Studies Department is set on increasing gender awareness in every aspect of the teaching, and also cast on empowering women. Other schools don't forecast the issue of gender. This provides the department with an opportunity to sensitize people with gender issues."
As a local academy within the Cisco Networking Academy structure, the department of Women and Gender Studies is committed to holding all female classes and gender balanced classes with the aim of increasing the number of females in the IT workforce. "[The program] shall work to integrate the Cisco curriculum into the general curriculum offered by the department of Women and Gender Studies," Mutuwa emphasizes, "and work on forming a partnership with the Institute of computer Science of Makerere University to form a strategy for greater participation of females in the Cisco Networking Academy Program." The Academy at Makerere University has been especially successful in promoting female enrollment in technology education. This success is due to many factors: the already high female participation in the Gender Department, the training of female teachers, the use of all female classes, and the existence of high-level government support. Makerere University has also been very innovative in recruiting female participants. For example, students are given reduced tuition if they are able to recruit female friends and classmates to the program.
The Gender Department did face some challenges in its early days. Mutuwa explains that, "The main difficulty was obtaining contributions from different bodies. The main challenge was financial." Today, however, the challenge is simply to keep up with demand. "There are an increasing number of students and limited space and lecturers. The number of lecturers is very small compared to the growing number of students." Indeed, the Academy at Makerere University is quickly showing that women in Uganda are interested in technology related fields and pursuing opportunities in the Internet Economy.
University homepage: http://www.makerere.ac.ug/womenstudies/index.htm
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