President Yoweri Museveni has recommended that Uganda should open up to multiparty politics. Top Movement sources told 93.3 Monitor FM Newsnight programme that the president announced the new direction on Tuesday, 18 February 2003, during a meeting at State House.

The Reform Agenda has called for immediate free secondary education for children from war-ravaged areas because their parents are unable to raise school fees. "Their parents are in the internally displaced people's camps, unable to cultivate crops or do anything to earn a livelihood to pay fees," Reform Agenda deputy secretary Louis Otika said.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni convened a special cabinet meeting on Friday in the capital, Kampala, to discuss a report on allegations that Ugandan army officers were involved in looting natural resources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to The New Vision government-owned newspaper.

KPMG Uganda, a professional services company, started a three-day workshop on 'fighting corruption and fraud' last week. During the official opening, Jotham Tumwesigye, the Inspector General of Government said, "It has long been recognised that corruption and fraud lurk at the very heart of our society, business and lives. If unchecked, these vices could very well undo the gains and hard work of the Ugandan people."

A total of 10,000 people, or one third of the 30,000 anti-retro viral (ARV) users in sub-Saharan Africa, are in Uganda, the ministry of health announced this week. "Uganda has been able to achieve this because it has made a marathon roll out of Voluntary Counselling and Testing or VCT's, which is necessary if drug misuse, and eventual resistance is to be avoided," the Minister of State for Health, Mike Mukula, told IRIN on Wednesday.

Britain has given Shs 1.5bn (£600,000) to boost education in Uganda through the Commonwealth Education Fund. The fund was started in 2002 by the British government to help poor countries develop their education systems. Seventeen Commonwealth countries, including Uganda, are to benefit from the initial fund of £10m.

Trials of a potential Aids vaccine for Africa have begun with human volunteers in Uganda, one of the worst hit countries on the continent. The vaccine is specifically designed to combat the A strain of the HIV virus, which is the type prevalent in east Africa.

Uganda has agreed to withdraw its troops from Ituri Province, in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is after the United Nations warned that Uganda and Rwanda had begun fresh deployments of troops near Bunia, in Ituri Province, despite pulling out most of their soldiers late last year under a peace agreement.

PROMPT, a UK based charity working in partnership with The Mifumi Project and The Nagongera Women's Guild in Tororo, Eastern Uganda, has established a pilot project with funds from Comic Relief, which is one of the first of its kind in Uganda. The purpose of the project is to promote protection for and support the needs of women experiencing domestic violence, by putting in place a number of policy, procedural and practical measures.

Ugandan public primary schools will now offer free education to all children of schooling age, instead of just four per family, President Yoweri Museveni announced here last Friday. Museveni told journalists at the State House here that government would pay school dues for 6,57 million children in its schools.

Officials in the district of Lira, northern Uganda, have launched an appeal to finance 36 temporary "learning centres" for children displaced by insecurity caused by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group.

The Ugandan authorities have discounted local media reports of 79 deaths from severe famine in the semi-arid northeastern part of the country.

The influx into Uganda of Rwandan refugees expelled from Tanzania continues unabated, breaking down the screening capacity at Uganda's border posts. Refugee rights' lawyers have called on the governments of Uganda and Tanzania to intervene to avert conflict between the refugees and locals who are increasingly competing for land.

101.7 Mama FM, 'The Voice to Listen To' is the first radio station run by and for women in Africa, and one of three in the world. Mama FM is a community radio station aiming to address the plight of the underprivileged through developmental interactive communication and broadcasting gender sensitive educational programmes. Covering a radius of 400 km and 13 million people in Uganda, the station broadcasts in English, Kiswahili and local languages.

The promotion of human welfare is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges of economic development. To achieve this, many developing countries adopted trade liberalisation in the late 1980s. Analysis of Uganda, a typical Sub- Saharan Africa country largely recognized as a front-runner in trade liberalisation, finds that trade liberalisation is no panacea to developing country problems, says this paper from the United Nations University.

We are looking for dynamic and competent candidates to fill the Country Director positions in the countries in Africa where we work. These are very senior leadership and management positions in the organisation directly reporting to the Africa Regional Director and having functional relationships with counterparts in Africa and other divisions and regions of ActionAid.

In a "dramatic policy U-turn," the Ugandan government has agreed to increase health sector spending with money from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a move that will increase the country's resources devoted to health care, including HIV/AIDS, the Lancet reports.

Male to female domestic violence levels in rural Uganda are high and associated with both alcohol consumption and the male partner's perceived risk of HIV, according to a study conducted by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study found that approximately one in three women living in rural Uganda reported being physically threatened or assaulted by their current partner.

There are nearly 5 000 chimpanzees living in Uganda, according to a recently completed census. But continued hunting and human encroachment on their habitat could reduce that number, said scientists on Tuesday.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) office in Kenya launched a programme on Monday to screen former Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army rebels who wish to apply for an amnesty and return to Uganda.