The Uganda Bureau of Statistics has reported that 95 per cent of Ugandan women and girls have experienced physical or sexual violence since the age of 15. Universities, therefore, cannot be treated as isolated spaces immune from the wider national problem.
OPINION | Universities Must End the Silence on Sexual Harassment
By Frank Byaruhanga
A final-year university student is just three months away from graduation. Her tuition has been paid, her family has sold land to finance her education, and only one signature stands between her and a degree. That signature belongs to a lecturer who has been sending her late-night messages, asking her to visit his office alone and reminding her that supervisors have considerable discretion.
She has not agreed to his advances. But she knows that refusing could jeopardise everything she has worked so hard to achieve.
This is the quiet bargain at the heart of sexual harassment in Uganda’s institutions of higher learning: comply or risk losing your academic future. It is rarely spoken openly, making it difficult to prove and easy for perpetrators to deny.
Research conducted by MEMPROW Girls Network in Kampala, Arua and Pakwach paints a disturbing picture of the problem. Between 31 and 40 per cent of students in the institutions studied said they had experienced sexual harassment or coercion during their studies. About 70 per cent of these cases were never reported through any channel.
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Put differently, in a lecture hall of 100 students, as many as 40 may have experienced harassment or coercion, yet only about 10 complaints would reach university offices.
The consequences of this silence are devastating. Among survivors who had no safe avenue for redress, 85 per cent went on to experience at least one serious consequence, including declining academic performance, dropping out of university, clinical depression, post-traumatic stress or suicidal thoughts.
Although these findings are based on field engagements rather than a nationally representative sample, they point to a problem far bigger than official complaint records suggest.
The gap between reported cases and actual experiences should therefore not be mistaken for evidence of safe campuses. Rather, it reflects how little confidence students have in the systems meant to protect them.
To understand why students remain silent, one must first understand the power lecturers wield within universities.
A lecturer is more than an academic instructor. He may set and mark coursework, supervise dissertations, approve research proposals, sign off final results, write recommendation letters and influence students’ access to internships and scholarships.
For a student approaching graduation, each of these responsibilities represents a door that can either be opened or closed. In many cases, there is no second marker, anonymous grading system or independent review mechanism. One lecturer’s decision can determine whether a young woman graduates on time, repeats a year or abandons her studies altogether.
The imbalance is further compounded by age, gender and social status. The lecturer may be a senior academic and respected community figure, while the student is a young woman from a financially struggling family, perhaps the first to reach university.
Rejecting his advances could mean failing a course. Reporting him could expose her to victimisation, humiliation or being labelled a troublemaker. Worse still, her complaint may be handled by his colleagues, people who share offices, meetings and social relationships with him.
In such circumstances, silence becomes a form of self-preservation rather than weakness.
Institutional protection remains inadequate
The institutions expected to protect students are themselves struggling with significant gaps.
MEMPROW’s review found that only one of the six institutions studied had a current, standalone sexual harassment policy. The others relied on general codes of conduct that often failed to clearly define sexual harassment.
Even where policies exist, their scope is frequently limited to university premises, excluding hostels, transport, contractors, internships and teaching practice placements, which are among the environments where students are particularly vulnerable.
Some disciplinary committees also apply standards of proof associated with criminal proceedings, creating an almost impossible burden for survivors in cases where harassment rarely leaves physical evidence.
Meanwhile, funding for independent investigators, counsellors and medical services remains inadequate. Older policies have also failed to address emerging forms of abuse, including online harassment, secret recordings, image-based blackmail and AI-generated sexual images.
The regulatory and oversight institutions responsible for addressing these shortcomings have not done enough.
The National Council for Higher Education, which licenses and accredits universities, does not firmly require institutions to maintain comprehensive sexual harassment policies as a condition of licensing. Consequently, institutions face limited consequences for failing to establish adequate protection mechanisms.
The Equal Opportunities Commission has powers to direct institutions to take corrective measures and require action within six months. However, these powers have not been sufficiently used to compel universities to establish independent disciplinary committees, allocate dedicated budgets and publish annual reports on sexual harassment cases.
University councils and management, which control institutional budgets and appointments, have also allowed policies to remain outdated, underfunded and poorly enforced.
At the legislative level, Parliament has allowed the Sexual Offences Bill to stall after years of attempts to enact it, while a court ruling has removed provisions relating to unauthorised recording.
Even the Employment (Amendment) Act, which obliges employers to prevent sexual harassment, primarily protects employees rather than students. This creates a troubling gap: a university may have a legal obligation to protect its cleaner from harassment by a lecturer but lack equally clear obligations towards a student facing harassment from the same individual.
Yet Uganda has made international commitments to address gender-based violence.
The country has ratified the Maputo Protocol, which obliges states to protect women and girls from harassment in educational institutions, punish perpetrators and provide counselling and rehabilitation.
It has also ratified an international convention on violence and harassment at work, which covers interns and trainees.
The Uganda Bureau of Statistics has reported that 95 per cent of Ugandan women and girls have experienced physical or sexual violence since the age of 15. Universities, therefore, cannot be treated as isolated spaces immune from the wider national problem.
The commitments are there. What remains missing is effective implementation and enforcement.
Internship students are particularly vulnerable
One of the most troubling gaps emerges during internship placements, where responsibility for protecting students often becomes blurred.
When harassment occurs at a workplace, the university may argue that the incident happened outside its premises. The host organisation may respond that the student belongs to the university.
The student is consequently left without clear institutional support, while the person accused of harassment may continue controlling her assessment and professional progress.
This situation must change.
Importantly, addressing campus sexual harassment does not require waiting for new legislation. Existing institutions and university management structures can take practical steps immediately.
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The National Council for Higher Education should make comprehensive sexual harassment policies a mandatory requirement for licensing, accreditation and re-accreditation. Institutions that fail to comply should risk regulatory sanctions.
The Equal Opportunities Commission should exercise its directive powers to require all licensed institutions to establish independent complaints mechanisms, allocate dedicated funding and regularly report cases and their outcomes.
Universities, meanwhile, must remove the power to investigate and determine complaints from individuals who have personal or professional connections to the accused.
Anyone accused of harassment, or closely associated with them, should be excluded from handling the complaint and accessing confidential case files.
Complaints should initially be received by trained, independent officers outside the academic hierarchy. Once a complaint is lodged, the affected student should be assigned a different lecturer or supervisor, receive an independent review of her academic results and be allowed an alternative internship placement without penalty.
Universities should also introduce anonymous or double marking wherever possible to prevent individual lecturers from exercising excessive control over students’ academic futures.
Retaliation against students who report harassment should be treated as a separate disciplinary offence.
Survivors must have control over the process
The complaints process must also respect the dignity and choices of survivors.
Students should be allowed to give evidence in writing, through video, using a representative or with a support person present. No survivor should be forced to confront the accused in person.
Disciplinary hearings should follow administrative standards of proof, based on the balance of probabilities, rather than demanding criminal-level evidence. Survivors should not be required to produce corroborating evidence in every case or subjected to irrelevant questions about their sexual history.
Universities must also provide funded counselling, medical care and peer support from the time a complaint is lodged, regardless of whether the case ultimately succeeds.
As one survivor observed, she did not need pity; she needed someone trained to help her cope with the experience so that she could remain in school.
That is the kind of support institutions should be providing.
The call to action is straightforward.
Vice-chancellors, university principals and governing councils should publish updated, standalone sexual harassment policies within months, establish protected annual budgets and regularly disclose anonymised information about complaints and their outcomes.
The National Council for Higher Education should immediately communicate the requirements to all licensed institutions and begin the regulatory changes necessary to make student protection a condition of institutional accreditation.
The Equal Opportunities Commission should exercise its enforcement powers, while oversight bodies, including the Inspectorate of Government, should demand accountability from institutions that fail to protect students.
Parents, student leaders and civil society organisations also have a role to play. Before enrolling a daughter or any young person at a university, families should be asking a simple but important question: Who will listen and protect this student if she reports sexual harassment by a lecturer?
Behind every unreported case is a student who has weighed her academic future against her personal safety and chosen silence.
The universities collecting her tuition fees and the regulators licensing those institutions owe her more than promises and policies gathering dust.
They owe her a safe learning environment where academic success is determined by merit, not sexual compliance, and where speaking out against abuse is no longer a gamble with one’s future.
The writer is a communications practitioner.
