Op-Ed (UGNEWSLINE) – Imagine a second-year student at a university in northern Uganda. A lecturer has been demanding more than her assignments. He hints that her grade depends on her “cooperation.” After weeks of sleeplessness, she files a complaint with the university’s sexual harassment committee. When she reads the committee list, his name is on it.
She must now decide whether to withdraw, to trust that he will step aside, or to sit before a panel that includes the man she is accusing. For most students, the answer is silence.
Research by MEMPROW Girls Network across Kampala, Arua and Pakwach in 2026 shows how common that choice is. Between 31 and 40 per cent of students in the six institutions studied said they had experienced sexual harassment or coercion, and about 70 per cent of those cases were never reported. In a lecture hall of 100 students, only about ten complaints would ever reach a university office.
Among survivors with no safe route to redress, 85 per cent suffered at least one serious consequence, such as a lasting drop in grades, leaving the institution, depression, post-traumatic stress or suicidal thoughts. These figures come from field engagements and are not a nationally representative sample, but they point to a problem far larger than any case log suggests.
Harassment thrives where power is concentrated, and the perpetrator in a university holds a great deal of it. A lecturer marks coursework, supervises research, signs off results, writes references and approves internship placements. He often sits on the very committees that judge misconduct. When the person accused controls the survivor’s academic future, a complaint is not a simple request for help. It is a gamble with her degree, her scholarship and her family’s sacrifice.
Many committees are drawn from the same senior staff pool that includes the people most likely to be accused. Without a written recusal rule, nothing stops an accused person from sitting on the panel, reading the complaint file, learning who filed it or influencing who investigates. A system that makes a student expose herself to the accused before it protects her is not a safety mechanism. It is a trap.
The MEMPROW Survey found that only one of the six institutions had a current, standalone policy. The others relied on general codes of conduct that often do not define sexual harassment. Where policies exist, they tend to stop at the campus gate, leaving out hostels, transport, contractors, internships and teaching practice.
Many committees demand proof beyond reasonable doubt, which is nearly impossible when harassment leaves no physical evidence. Budgets for investigators, counsellors and medical care are almost nonexistent, and cases are judged by staff who know, work with and sometimes depend on the accused.
Students in Arua, Gulu, Lira and other towns in West Nile and the northern region face these gaps with added pressures, though these are patterns to be tested with field data rather than established findings.
Many students come from distant, poorer districts and live in rented rooms outside campus, where policies do not reach. Others come from communities still recovering from decades of conflict, where trauma is common and mental health services are thin. In smaller academic communities, everyone knows everyone.
A lecturer may be a family friend, a church elder or a clan member of the committee chair, so a complaint travels fast and a reputation can be destroyed overnight, usually the survivors. For students on bursaries, a failed course can end an education a whole family has paid for, and with few alternative institutions nearby, leaving is rarely realistic.
Across the country, the pattern repeats in public and private universities, teacher training colleges, technical institutes and nursing schools. Smaller tertiary institutions often have the weakest protections, sometimes no committee at all. A student at a technical college may have nowhere to go but the principal’s office, and the principal may be the problem.
Harassment has also moved online, into secret recordings, image-based blackmail, leaked messaging groups and AI-generated sexual images. Most policies were written before any of this, and the law has recently grown thinner, not stronger.
This is where the Inspectorate of Government (IGG) can matter. As the country’s anti-corruption and ombudsman body, it has a constitutional mandate over abuse of office and administrative injustice, and public universities are public bodies. Using academic power to extract sexual favors is an abuse of authority. The IGG can investigate complaints that an institution buried a case or that an accused person interfered with it. It can audit whether each institution has a current policy, an independent committee, a recusal rule, a funded response and an annual case report. It can direct that accused persons be barred from the committee, the file and the investigation, and it can pursue disciplinary referral or prosecution where abuse of office is found.
For private institutions, where the IGG’s reach is narrower, the regulator’s licensing power becomes the main lever. Perhaps most important is visibility: an institution that knows its record could be examined publicly has a reason to act first.
The deeper fix is to reduce the perpetrator’s power and return it to the survivor. Institutions can begin by separating the power to harm from the power to judge. Anyone accused, or closely connected to the accused, should be automatically barred from the committee and the file. Complaints should go first to a trained, independent officer outside the academic hierarchy, ideally an external or jointly appointed person, so no student has to knock on a lecturer’s door to report a lecturer.
Grades and placements should be taken out of the hands of the accused. From the moment a complaint is made, the student should have a different marker, a different supervisor, independent review of her results and the right to an alternative placement without penalty. Wherever possible, assessment should be anonymous or double-marked so that no single lecturer decides a student’s future. Retaliation should be treated as a separate offence with its own penalty.
Power must then move to the survivor. She should decide how she gives testimony: by written statement, by video, through a representative, behind a screen or with a support person beside her. Facing the accused in a safe, supported setting can be part of recovery for some survivors, but it must be her choice. She should be told what is happening at each stage, control how her identity is shared, and be able to withdraw without punishment. Hearings should be administrative, decided on the balance of probabilities, with no demand for corroboration and no questions about her sexual history.
Healing must run alongside justice. Funded counselling, medical care and peer support groups should be available from day one, whether or not the case succeeds. As one survivor put it in the account that informed this work, she did not need pity; she needed someone trained to help her carry the experience so she could stay in school.
Students also need routes that bypass their institution entirely, such as the Sauti 116 helpline, the IGG, the Uganda Human Rights Commission, police family protection units and community legal aid clinics. Safer spaces such as peer-led survivor circles and confidential campus clinics can give girls a place to speak before they are ready to file anything.
Every university and tertiary institution should be able to answer one question: if a student reports a lecturer tomorrow, who will hear her case, and can she trust them? If the answer is his colleagues, or worse, himself, the policy is decoration. Behind every unreported case is a young woman who weighed her future against her safety and chose silence. The institutions that collected her fees owe her a system in which speaking up is no longer a gamble.
By ; Byaruhanga Frank, Communications Practioner
