The Norwegian Embassy in Uganda is considering cancelling the projects grant they had awarded to Makerere University over allegations of bribery in the office of a top member of management, the dean of students, our sources have revealed.
This has all been expressed in a letter that the university received from the embassy on the matter.
Under the Norwegian Program for Capacity Building in Higher Education and Research Development(NORHED), the university was to receive over shs. 18 billion annually to support programs of learning at the university.
The support, according to our sources, is aimed at improving learning in a total of 9 projects at the university.
The said projects are in Education and Training, Health, Natural Resources Management, Climate & Environment, Democratic and Economic governance, Humanities, Culture, Media and Communication as well as capacity development.
Uganda won 14 NORHED projects out of the 46 that were available to all countries and 9 of those 14 are centred at Makerere University.
Therefore, of the 14 NORHED Projects, Makerere University takes the lead in 9 Projects while partner institutions take the lead in the other 5.
The main activities covered under the programme are training at both Masters and PhD, research by both graduate and postdoctoral students, support to development of research infrastructure, as well as review and development of new academic programmes.
Several structures have been erected at the institution using funding from this programme.
The dean of students is still under the spotlight as the student petitioner, Ronald Ainebyoona maintains that he solicited a bribe for him to be duly nominated for the position of guild president at the institution.
Under this notice, Makerere research could be crippled by almost a half as most of their funding has been through grants and donations such as this instead of coming from the government.
