In a bid to redeem its good image, Uganda’s oldest university, Makerere University has launched a campaign aimed at fostering good relations with the neighboring villages that have over the years been targets of violent strikes by its students.

The initiative to establish the good relations with the neighbouring communities was launched on Thursday by the university’s Vice Chancellor, Prof. Barnabas Nawangwe alongside other officials and students’ Guild leaders.

Dubbed,’ Make Connect Initiative’, the campaign will involve planting of trees and cleaning of the dusty villages that surround the university and host many of the private hostels that offer accommodation to students that don’t stay within one of the best universities in Africa although internal administrative wrangles continue to hurt its mission of producing best human resource for the global labour market.

The initiative will run under the theme, “Celebrating Makerere’s diversity and contribution through community outreach.”

Prof. Nawangwe said, “I will participate and I am going to mobilise the administration to participate.”

The planting of trees and cleaning these areas is aimed at reconciling the residents with Makerere students who have for long destroyed their properties and businesses during the violent strikes.

The Students’ Guild President, Julius Katerega commended the initiative saying: “It is an appreciation of the roles Makerere University in social transformation and improving the livelihoods of people which all together contributes to national development.”

He said the initiative intends to create a platform for community inclusive interaction, diversity and celebration of the university’s diversity and also create awareness on the services Ugandans can tap into at the university.

He said that the initiative would also provide free career guidance and other related services to Kampala people next month.

Residents have over the years known the university’s students as being violent as they have on several occasions lost property because of the strikes in the university.

Residents in the neighbourhood have welcomed the initiative and hope to join hands with students and university leaders to clean their surroundings that are littered with all sorts of rubbish including solid materials, plastics, food leftovers, human and animal excreta, just to mention but a few.

“We welcome the initiative and I hope it can be done every year,” said Abdu Karim, who stays and operates boda boda business in Makerere Kikoni.

“We actually hate students because when they strike they target our businesses as if we work in the university. I hope the new initiave by the university to reach out to us will change our negative attitudes towards students who have for many years destroyed our properties and businesses,” said Hadija Nakimuli, a businesswoman in Wandegeya.

The four–phased  initiative started Saturday with ‘The Greening and Cleaning Campaign’ where the students, alumni, well-wishers and the staff members planted trees and cleaned neighbouring suburbs of Wandegeya, Kikoni and Kasubi.

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More women and their children are surviving today than ever before, according to new child and maternal mortality estimates released by United Nations groups led by UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Since 2000, child deaths have reduced by nearly half and maternal deaths by over one-third, mostly due to improved access to affordable, quality health services.

“In countries that provide everyone with safe, affordable, high-quality health services, women and babies survive and thrive,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO. “This is the power of universal health coverage.”

Still, the new estimates reveal that 6.2 million children under 15 years died in 2018, and over 290 000 women died due to complications during pregnancy and childbirth in 2017. Of the total child deaths, 5.3 million occurred in the first 5 years, with almost half of these in the first month of life.

Women and newborns are most vulnerable during and immediately after childbirth. An estimated 2.8 million pregnant women and newborns die every year, or one every 11 seconds, mostly of preventable causes, the new estimates say.

Children face the highest risk of dying in the first month, especially if they are born too soon or too small, have complications during birth, congenital defects, or contract infections. About a third of these deaths occur within the first day and nearly three quarters in the first week alone.

“Around the world, birth is a joyous occasion. Yet, every 11 seconds, a birth is a family tragedy,” said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director. “A skilled pair of hands to help mothers and newborns around the time of birth, along with clean water, adequate nutrition, basic medicines and vaccines, can make the difference between life and death. We must do all it takes to invest in universal health coverage to save these precious lives.”

The estimates also show vast inequalities worldwide, with women and children in sub-Saharan Africa facing a substantially higher risk of death than in all other regions.

Levels of maternal deaths are nearly 50 times higher for women in sub-Saharan Africa and their babies are 10 times more likely to die in their first month of life, compared to high-income countries.

In 2018, 1 in 13 children in sub-Saharan Africa died before their fifth birthday this is 15 times higher than the risk a child faces in Europe, where just 1 in 196 children aged less than 5 die.

Women in sub-Saharan Africa face a 1 in 37 lifetime risk of dying during pregnancy or childbirth. By comparison, the lifetime risk for a woman in Europe is 1 in 6500. Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia account for around 80 per cent of global maternal and child deaths. Countries in conflict or humanitarian crisis often have weak health systems that prevent women and children from accessing essential lifesaving care.

The world has made substantial progress in reducing child and maternal mortality. Since 1990, there has been a 56 per cent reduction in deaths of children under 15 years from 14.2 million deaths to 6.2 million in 2018. Countries in Eastern and South-Eastern Asia have made the most progress, with an 80 per cent decline in under-five deaths.

And from 2000 to 2017, the maternal mortality ratio declined by 38 per cent. Southern Asia has made the greatest improvements in maternal survival with a nearly 60 per cent reduction in the maternal mortality ratio since 2000.

Belarus, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Malawi, Morocco, Mongolia, Rwanda, Timor-Leste and Zambia are some of the countries that have shown substantial progress in reducing child or maternal mortality. Success has been due to political will to improve access to quality health care by investing in the health workforce, introducing free care for pregnant women and children and supporting family planning. Many of these countries focus on primary health care and universal health coverage.

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The Directorate of Public Prosecution (DPP) is set to start using anatomical dolls in the prosecution of sexual offenses involving children and vulnerable victims

The office of DPP this morning received anatomical dolls from children at Risk Action Network (CRANE), an organization that supports prosecution of cases of sexual and gender based violence involving children.

According to Jane Okuo Kajuga, a senior assistant in DPP’s office, the anatomical dolls will be used as demonstration aids to help young victims of Sexual violence to clearly show to court what happened to them and also aid the prosecutor to lead the evidence without compelling the victim to recite words that they may be uncomfortable mentioning in public. Vulnerable witnesses like the deaf, dumb may also use them.

“Sexual offences form the bulk of cases handled by the ODPP at the High Court and most witnesses are children. Research shows that young children are better able to communicate through demonstration than through language and the dolls provide children with a road map of the body.” Reads in part of the statement.

She said in a criminal trial, prosecution is required to prove a case beyond reasonable doubt. This the prosecutors do so through witnesses who are called to tell court what happened. Oftentimes, the court will require this witness to clearly state how they were abused and if they are unable to do so the case may be dismissed on grounds that the prosecution has failed to prove a case beyond reasonable doubt.

“Uganda as a country has most of its beliefs on a strong cultural setting. Most of the cultures believe or perceive the sexual act as a bad act that is not to be discussed in the open. Because of the strong cultural restrictions, some witnesses find it difficult to openly talk about sexuality. Individuals, families, tribes, communities all use different terms to refer to sexual organs,” she said.

Given that most cases of child sexual abuse lack external corroborating evidence, children’s verbal accounts of their experiences are of paramount importance to investigators and prosecutions. The use of the anatomical dolls by prosecutors is expected to improve access to justice for children and vulnerable victims of crime through improved success rate in

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By Tobias Adrian and Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli

A battle is raging for your wallet. New entrants want to occupy the space once used by paper bills or your debit card.

The adoption of new, digital payment methods could bring significant benefits to customers and society: improved efficiency, greater competition, broader financial inclusion, and more innovation. But it could invite risks to financial stability and integrity, monetary policy effectiveness, and competition standards, as outlined in a recent IMF staff paper, the first of a new series of Fintech Notes.

Stablecoin adoption

Adoption of new forms of money will depend on their attractiveness as a store of value and a means of payment. New entrants like stablecoins, however, are significantly different from the popular incumbents: cash or bank deposits.

While many stablecoins continue to be claims on the issuing institution or its underlying assets, and many also offer redemption guarantees at face value (a coin bought for 10 euros can be exchanged back for a 10-euro note, like a bank account), government-backing is absent. Trust must be generated privately by backing coin issuance with safe and liquid assets. And the settlement technology is usually decentralized, based on the blockchain model.

Times are changing. USD Coin recently launched in 85 countries, Facebook announced Libra, and centralized variants of the stablecoin business model are becoming widespread. So why are stablecoins taking off?

The strength of stablecoins is their attractiveness as a means of payment. Low costs, global reach, and speed are all huge potential benefits. Moreover, stablecoins could allow seamless payments of blockchain-based assets, and can be embedded into digital applications thanks to their open architecture, as opposed to the proprietary legacy systems of banks.

But the strongest attraction comes from the networks that promise to make transacting as easy as using social media. Payments are more than the mere act of transferring money. They are a fundamentally social experience linking people. Stablecoins offer the potential for better integration into our digital lives and are designed by firms that thrive on user-centric design. Large technology firms with enormous global user bases offer a ready-made network over which new payment services can quickly spread.

Risks of stablecoins

Risks abound, however—so policymakers must create an environment that maximizes benefits and minimizes risks. Policymakers will need to innovate and collaborate across countries, but also across functions. Here are six observations for them to consider.

First, banks may lose their place as intermediaries if they lose deposits to stablecoin providers. But banks are not sitting ducks. They will surely try to compete by offering their own innovations (and higher interest rates). Also, stablecoin providers could recycle their funds into the banking system, or decide to engage in lending by extending deposits themselves. In short, banks are unlikely to disappear.

Second, new monopolies could arise. Tech giants could use their networks to shut out competitors and monetize information, using proprietary access to data on customer transactions. New standards are needed for data protection, portability, control, and ownership. And services need to be interoperable to facilitate entry.

Third, weaker currencies could face threats. In countries with high inflation and weak institutions, local currencies might be shunned in favor of stablecoins in foreign currency. This would be a new form of “dollarization” and might undermine monetary policy, financial development, and economic growth. As countries are forced to improve their monetary and fiscal policies, they will have to decide whether to restrict foreign-currency stablecoins.

Fourth, stablecoins could promote illicit activities. Providers must show how they will prevent the use of their networks for activities like money laundering and terrorist financing by enforcing international standards. New technologies offer opportunities to improve monitoring, however supervisors will need to adapt to the more fragmented and geographically diverse value chain of stablecoins.

Fifth, stablecoins could provoke the loss of “seigniorage,” where central banks capture profits from the difference between a currency’s face value and its manufacturing cost. Issuers could siphon off profits if their stablecoins do not carry interest but if the hard currency backing them earns a return. One way to address this issue is to promote competition so issuers of coins would eventually pay interest.

Sixth, policymakers must reinforce consumer protection and financial stability. Customer funds must be safe and protected from bank runs. This calls for legal clarity on what kind of financial instruments stablecoins represent. One approach would be to regulate stablecoins like money market funds that guarantee fixed nominal returns, requiring providers to maintain sufficient liquidity and capital.

Stablecoins thus present as many conundrums as they do potential benefits—and policymakers would be wise to envision far-sighted regulatory regimes that will meet the challenge. The policies adopted today will mold the world of tomorrow. We explore one such avenue in our next blog.

This blog is the first in a 2-part series on IMFBlog covering digital currencies.

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