Event Opens With Moment Of Silence For Female Student Recently Killed By Husband As Speakers Demand Accountability, Action, And Inclusive Gender Reform
What was meant to be a celebration carried the weight of grief from its very first moments.
Kyambogo University’s Post International Women’s Day commemorations, held on March 26, 2026, opened with a moment of silence for a female student recently killed by her husband — a sobering reminder that the theme of the day, “A Call to Action: Scaling Up Advocacy to Accelerate Access to Justice, Equal Rights and Empowerment for ALL Women and Girls,” was not merely aspirational language. For some women and girls in Uganda, it is a matter of life and death.
The event, organised by the university’s Directorate of Gender Mainstreaming, brought together students, academics, legal experts, and university leadership for what became a frank, wide-ranging, and at times uncomfortable conversation about the state of women’s rights in Uganda — and the distance between the legal protections that exist on paper and the reality that women and girls continue to live.
The welcoming remarks from Kyambogo University Guild President Emmanuel Andama struck a note that would echo through several subsequent contributions. While commending the university administration and the Directorate of Gender Mainstreaming for providing a platform for women’s empowerment, Andama raised an argument that is frequently overlooked in gender conversations.
“As we are empowering women, we should empower men who are the counterparts — and if not taken care of, then the girl child will be violated,” he told attendees.
The argument — that sustainable women’s empowerment requires the simultaneous engagement and development of men — set up a recurring theme of the day: that gender justice is not a zero-sum competition between women and men, but a structural challenge that requires the participation of everyone.
Dr. Deborah Nakalyowa, Head of the Directorate of Gender Mainstreaming at Kyambogo University, was clear-eyed about the challenge at the heart of the event’s theme.
“Rights become a promise that will never arrive if justice has not prevailed,” she said — a statement that captured in a single sentence the frustration driving much of the day’s discourse.
Her remarks emphasised that the celebration was not self-congratulatory. It was a deliberate effort to confront the challenges that women and girls continue to face across all dimensions of their lives, and to demand concrete progress rather than continued acknowledgement of a problem without resolution.
Counsel Norah Matovu brought a practitioner’s perspective to the proceedings, offering a candid assessment of Uganda’s legal and policy landscape on women’s rights — one that acknowledged genuine progress while refusing to paper over persistent failures.
She noted that a range of instruments and frameworks have been adopted to address the violation of women’s rights, and that the legal framework protecting and actualising those rights has improved in meaningful ways. But she was equally direct about what those improvements have not yet delivered.
“Accountability — how do we ensure that those who have the power and authority use it well for the benefit of us all?” she asked. “We need to be proactive.”
Cultural norms, she observed, remain among the most stubborn barriers to women’s empowerment — limitations that legal frameworks alone cannot dismantle. Her message, however, was not defeatist.
“We cannot give up. The door has been opened to improve the status of women. Each one of us has a role to play — being solution finders in order to make a difference. We need to stay persistent and committed for a perfect change,” Counsel Matovu said.
The guest speaker, Dr. Daniel R. Ruhweza, Senior Lecturer at Makerere University School of Law, delivered what was perhaps the most analytically detailed contribution of the day — a presentation titled “Reconceptualising Justice: A Trivalent, Distributive and Inclusive Approach to Gender Equality in Uganda’s Education Institutions.”
His data painted a picture of a gender landscape in higher education that is more complex than simple narratives of female disadvantage suggest. Women currently account for 43.1 percent of public university intake — a figure that reflects decades of deliberate affirmative action policy. Yet female enrolment in STEM programmes stands at only 28.7 percent, revealing that access to university does not automatically translate into access to the most economically and professionally powerful disciplines.
More provocatively, Dr. Ruhweza flagged declining male enrolment in humanities and social sciences as a dimension of the gender picture that current reform frameworks have largely failed to address. His argument, grounded in what he described as Fresher’s Trivalent Model, proposed that genuine gender justice must be applied bidirectionally — addressing redistribution, recognition, and representation for all genders across all disciplines.
He identified resource disparity and institutional culture as the primary reasons current reforms have proven insufficient, and put forward five policy recommendations: gender responsive budgeting, a male student support framework, a pregnancy and parenting protocol for institutions, same-position return monitoring for female students who take academic breaks, and a unified gender monitoring system across institutions.
He closed with a formulation that drew considerable attention from the audience. “Justice is not a process, not a status. Epistemological democratisation must encompass the standpoints of all who are structurally excluded.”
Representing the Vice Chancellor, Chief Guest Owekitibwa Dr. Prosperous Nankindu, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages and Communication within Kyambogo’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities, acknowledged directly what many institutions are reluctant to admit: having the legal framework in place is not the same as living by it.
“We have the legal framework, but the practice is different — and difficult,” she said.
She encouraged attendees to expand their thinking about what investment in women actually means in practice, arguing that when women are given the tools and resources they need, they are capable of driving economic development at every level of society. She called for the deliberate dismantling of structural barriers, the consistent advancement of women’s rights across all levels of society, and the active evolution of male counterparts as partners rather than bystanders in the gender equality project.
Her message aligned with the day’s consistent thread: that the language of women’s empowerment, however well-intentioned, must be backed by structural change, institutional accountability, and the courage to confront cultural norms that legal frameworks alone cannot reach.
But for all the data, the policy recommendations, and the calls to action, it was the moment of silence at the beginning of the event that arguably said the most.
A student. A woman. Recently killed by her husband.
In a room gathered to celebrate progress on women’s rights, that fact needed no analysis, no framework, and no policy recommendation. It needed only to be acknowledged — and to remind everyone present of exactly why this conversation cannot be allowed to remain only a conversation.
