The House Committee on Education has been granted more time to complete investigations into allegations of sexual violence by security forces on Makerere University female students during the recent strike at the institution.

The Vice Chairperson of the Committee, John Twesigye Ntamuhiira, told Parliament that they had failed to talk to the victims of the alleged violence during the earlier given time.

“We discovered that there is more than meets the eye considering the issues of Makerere and that the students who were sexually abused could not show up for the meetings,” Ntamuhiira said during the sitting chaired yesterday by Speaker of Parliament Rebecca Kadaga.

Ntamuhiira said that the committee has made a final schedule of the meeting and will be able to exhaustively handle the matter and report to Parliament by December 10, 2019.

Following the recent students strike over the 15 percent increment in tuition fees at the country’s oldest university, it was claimed that security forces deployed there had sexually harassed students.

Parliament asked its Committee on Education and Sports to among others investigate the allegations and the alleged mismanagement at the university. The resolution followed a motion moved by the Shadow Minister of Education, Mathias Mpuuga. The Committee was scheduled to report back to the plenary by November 13, 2019.

The Committee held a number of meetings with the students and the management, which defended the fees increment saying that it would help in improving the facilities at the University. However, the students said they were not consulted on the matter and even after the increment there was no visible difference in the state of facilities at the institution.

The students also claimed that some of their fellow students had been brutally beaten and sexually abused by the security forces that were sent to prevent students’ the demonstration against 15 percent tuition rise.

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With informality affecting 61 percent of the world’s employed population, it is crucial to secure the livelihoods of workers and families who rely on the informal economy, according to Tackling vulnerability in the informal economy.

The joint report by the Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) examines the diverse reality and multiple faces of informality, based on a large sample of countries representing various conditions, locations and stages of development.

It uses recent ILO individual-based indicators of informality, available for 119 developing and developed countries, and the new OECD Key Indicators of Informality based on Individuals and their Household (KIIbIH), available for 27 emerging and developing countries.

The report finds that informality occurs in all types of employment and globally affects more than 4 in 5 own-account workers, 1 in 2 employers, 2 in 5 employees and all contributing family workers. The agriculture and industry sectors are the most exposed: nearly 94 percent of agriculture workers and 57 percent of industry workers are informal.

Furthermore, informality represents 70 percent of all employment in developing and emerging economies, compared with about 18 percent in developed countries. Globally, 81 percent of all enterprises are informal. While globally, informal employment is a greater source of employment for men, in a small majority of countries (55 percent), the share of women is higher.

The level of informal employment also varies substantially over the lifecycle, with youth and older workers more exposed. Informal employment absorbs less-educated workers: globally, about 94 percent of workers with no education are in informal employment, compared with 52 percent of those with secondary education and 24 percent of those with tertiary education.

The report, which for the first time adds a household dimension to the profiling of informal workers, shows that working individuals within households may be informally or formally employed.

A majority of households are completely informal (all working members in informal employment) in most countries for which data are available. The share of completely informal households also varies greatly across countries and regions, from 3 percent in Chile to 92 percent in Burkina Faso.

A large number of children and older individuals are indirectly exposed to informality: on average among the 27 countries covered, around 60 percent of all children (under age 15) and older individuals (over age 60) in developing and emerging economies live in completely informal households. The figure is 80 percent or above in some African countries.

The report shows that contrary to common belief, informal workers and firms contribute somewhat to tax collection efforts both directly, through indirect taxes and presumptive taxes, and indirectly, through the links between formal and informal outputs.

Furthermore, the informal economy also contributes to economic growth in several direct and indirect ways that go unrecognised, including the systematic transfer of hidden subsidies to the formal economy. Recent estimates point to a large contribution by the informal sector to GDP: as high as 30 percent with agriculture and 17 percent without agriculture.

The goal of universal social protection can only be reached if it is effectively extended to workers in the informal economy. This requires expanding both social insurance, which relies on employment-related contributions and thus may not reach the poorest, and social assistance, which targets the poor but relies on scarce public finance.

Ensuring that both social insurance and social assistance are designed and implemented in a gender-responsive way is indispensable to promote gender equality and achieve universal social protection. po

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