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Regulate the hidden campus
Uganda’s universities may be expanding, but the campuses surrounding them are expanding too—and largely without the same level of planning, regulation or accountability. If student accommodation is now an unofficial extension of the university, then the responsibility for making it safe, secure and fit for purpose must extend beyond the university gate.
Barbara Kaija. (File)
By: Barbara Kaija, Journalist @New Vision
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OPINION
Universities are expanding, but student accommodation has not kept pace. Around their gates, a vast private hostel economy has become an unofficial extension of campus, with consequences for students, parents, universities, surrounding communities and the country.
At five in the afternoon, one university campus begins to empty. Lecture rooms fall quiet and students stream through the gates. Yet for thousands of them, this is not the end of the university day. It is the beginning of life on the other campus, the network of hostels, rented rooms and student residences where many spend more time than in lecture halls, and where they make some of the most consequential decisions of their university years.
At Makerere University, nine halls of residence provide about 4,400 places, roughly ten per cent of the undergraduate population. Students who do not secure university accommodation must look to affiliated or private hostels.
The gap is even starker at Kyambogo University, which says it receives about 8,000 applications for on-campus accommodation from first-year students each year, while its five halls can house only about 1,400. More than half the external hostels it assessed were not self-contained. These are not simply shortages of buildings; they point to a larger question about how Uganda plans for higher education.
We know how many young people we are admitting. Do we know where they are going to live?
Private investors have stepped into the gap, providing thousands of beds universities could not provide themselves. Some hostels are professionally managed and well equipped, while others are not. Makerere grades private hostels A, B and C through its Hostel Inspection Committee, while MUBS requires students to register their private accommodation, creating a database that supports security and emergency but the picture nationally is far less consistent and that matters, because a student’s residence is part of the educational environment, not separate from it. Uganda does have a regulatory foundation. Kampala’s 2006 Student Hostels and Dormitories Ordinance requires licensing, minimum standards and a register of private hostels. But a twenty-year-old city ordinance cannot, by itself, constitute a coherent national system for a sector that has grown far beyond it. Nor can responsibility stop at the university gate.
We have had painful reminders of what happens when student accommodation fails. Media reports have documented deaths, fires, burglaries and rape linked to student hostels and have repeatedly raised concerns about weak security. In June 2026, a first-year Kyambogo student died after being attacked and set on fire in his rented room in Bweyogerere, only weeks after another student was found dead in his hostel room.
These tragedies should not be used to condemn hostel or even host home owners as a group. Private operators provide an essential service where public accommodation is inadequate, and many have invested substantially in security, sanitation and student welfare. But the good operator and the negligent one should not be indistinguishable to a parent arriving with a mattress and a semester’s savings. That is where Uganda needs to become more deliberate.
Other countries offer useful lessons. South Africa has established national minimum standards for student housing at public universities. The United Kingdom’s Student Accommodation Code sets a sector-wide framework for safety and management, covering more than 262,000 bed spaces. Australia has gone further, linking accommodation to institutional duty of care, with enforceable standards for preventing gender-based violence in student housing. Uganda can build its own version of this. It should be a framework that names, plainly, what each party in the system owes to the students at its centre.
For government, the responsibilities are several and should be spelled out rather than left implied. The Ministry of Education and Sports, working with the National Council for Higher Education, KCCA, local governments, universities and hostel owners, should develop a national student accommodation framework setting minimum standards for occupancy, room size, sanitation, ventilation, fire safety, security, accessibility, safeguarding and complaint mechanisms.
Private investors have stepped into the gap, providing thousands of beds universities could not provide themselves. Some hostels are professionally managed and well equipped, while others are not. Makerere grades private hostels A, B and C through its Hostel Inspection Committee, while MUBS requires students to register their private accommodation, creating a database that supports security and emergency but the picture nationally is far less consistent and that matters, because a student’s residence is part of the educational environment, not separate from it. Uganda does have a regulatory foundation. Kampala’s 2006 Student Hostels and Dormitories Ordinance requires licensing, minimum standards and a register of private hostels. But a twenty-year-old city ordinance cannot, by itself, constitute a coherent national system for a sector that has grown far beyond it. Nor can responsibility stop at the university gate.
We have had painful reminders of what happens when student accommodation fails. Media reports have documented deaths, fires, burglaries and rape linked to student hostels and have repeatedly raised concerns about weak security. In June 2026, a first-year Kyambogo student died after being attacked and set on fire in his rented room in Bweyogerere, only weeks after another student was found dead in his hostel room.
These tragedies should not be used to condemn hostel or even host home owners as a group. Private operators provide an essential service where public accommodation is inadequate, and many have invested substantially in security, sanitation and student welfare. But the good operator and the negligent one should not be indistinguishable to a parent arriving with a mattress and a semester’s savings. That is where Uganda needs to become more deliberate.
Other countries offer useful lessons. South Africa has established national minimum standards for student housing at public universities. The United Kingdom’s Student Accommodation Code sets a sector-wide framework for safety and management, covering more than 262,000 bed spaces. Australia has gone further, linking accommodation to institutional duty of care, with enforceable standards for preventing gender-based violence in student housing. Uganda can build its own version of this. It should be a framework that names, plainly, what each party in the system owes to the students at its centre.
For government, the responsibilities are several and should be spelled out rather than left implied. The Ministry of Education and Sports, working with the National Council for Higher Education, KCCA, local governments, universities and hostel owners, should develop a national student accommodation framework setting minimum standards for occupancy, room size, sanitation, ventilation, fire safety, security, accessibility, safeguarding and complaint mechanisms.
Government should also decide where hostels are allowed to operate. Hostels situated in slums should not be permitted to host university students, and pubs, brothels and bars should not be sited next to student hostels. A hostel’s surroundings are as much a part of student welfare as the building itself.
Every hostel serving university students should carry a registration or accreditation status that a student or parent can verify before paying, and government should publicise an annual ranking of private hostels, so good practice earns reputation and poor practice is exposed rather than hidden. Parliament, for its part, should ask whether current law reflects the reality that hundreds of thousands of young people are effectively living as part of Uganda’s higher-education system outside university-owned premises.
For universities, the responsibility does not end at the gate. They should not simply tell students to “find a hostel.” They should provide verified information, maintain accommodation registers where possible and ensure students know where to turn when they face insecurity, abuse or overcrowding. Kyambogo already states that students remain its responsibility even in private hostels; that principle deserves to become the norm. MUBS’s registration system and Makerere’s grading approach offer useful starting points for others. For hostel owners, the opportunity is to help professionalise the sector they have built. Their associations can do more than represent commercial interests; they can develop codes of conduct, train wardens, establish emergency procedures and safeguarding standards and hold members to peer accountability. Operators who already meet high standards have the most to gain from a system that distinguishes them from those who do not.
For parents and students, the discipline is to resist choosing accommodation on price or proximity alone. Before paying, it is worth asking where the student will sleep, who manages the facility, how many share the room, what security exists, where the emergency exits are, whether water is reliable and who to contact when something goes wrong, because the cheapest room can become the most expensive decision if it compromises a student’s safety, health or studies.
This matters particularly to the Emerging Leaders Programme. It sets out to nurture students who are sexually fortified, free from addiction, financially faithful and education-focused. These outcomes depend, in part, on the safety of student accommodation. A student who feels unsafe or exposed to exploitation is less able to build the discipline and character the programme seeks to instil. Uganda wants its universities to develop the head and hands, but also the heart and feet, as the First Lady, Hon. Janet Museveni, has envisaged. That means protecting students where they live, not only where they study.
A university, in other words, has two campuses: The one on the official map, and the one surrounding its gates. Uganda has spent years asking whether it has enough lecture rooms, laboratories and libraries. It should now ask, with equal seriousness, whether the young people using those facilities have a safe place to return to at night.
The other campus is already there. The question is whether Uganda is prepared to recognise it, regulate it and make it worthy of the young people we are investing so much to educate, For God and My Country.
The writer is an educationist, a media communication specialist and the Chairperson of the Board for the Emerging Leaders Programme; Kaijabarbara@gmail.com WhatsApp: 0708746624
Every hostel serving university students should carry a registration or accreditation status that a student or parent can verify before paying, and government should publicise an annual ranking of private hostels, so good practice earns reputation and poor practice is exposed rather than hidden. Parliament, for its part, should ask whether current law reflects the reality that hundreds of thousands of young people are effectively living as part of Uganda’s higher-education system outside university-owned premises.
For universities, the responsibility does not end at the gate. They should not simply tell students to “find a hostel.” They should provide verified information, maintain accommodation registers where possible and ensure students know where to turn when they face insecurity, abuse or overcrowding. Kyambogo already states that students remain its responsibility even in private hostels; that principle deserves to become the norm. MUBS’s registration system and Makerere’s grading approach offer useful starting points for others. For hostel owners, the opportunity is to help professionalise the sector they have built. Their associations can do more than represent commercial interests; they can develop codes of conduct, train wardens, establish emergency procedures and safeguarding standards and hold members to peer accountability. Operators who already meet high standards have the most to gain from a system that distinguishes them from those who do not.
For parents and students, the discipline is to resist choosing accommodation on price or proximity alone. Before paying, it is worth asking where the student will sleep, who manages the facility, how many share the room, what security exists, where the emergency exits are, whether water is reliable and who to contact when something goes wrong, because the cheapest room can become the most expensive decision if it compromises a student’s safety, health or studies.
This matters particularly to the Emerging Leaders Programme. It sets out to nurture students who are sexually fortified, free from addiction, financially faithful and education-focused. These outcomes depend, in part, on the safety of student accommodation. A student who feels unsafe or exposed to exploitation is less able to build the discipline and character the programme seeks to instil. Uganda wants its universities to develop the head and hands, but also the heart and feet, as the First Lady, Hon. Janet Museveni, has envisaged. That means protecting students where they live, not only where they study.
A university, in other words, has two campuses: The one on the official map, and the one surrounding its gates. Uganda has spent years asking whether it has enough lecture rooms, laboratories and libraries. It should now ask, with equal seriousness, whether the young people using those facilities have a safe place to return to at night.
The other campus is already there. The question is whether Uganda is prepared to recognise it, regulate it and make it worthy of the young people we are investing so much to educate, For God and My Country.
The writer is an educationist, a media communication specialist and the Chairperson of the Board for the Emerging Leaders Programme; Kaijabarbara@gmail.com WhatsApp: 0708746624