First Lady starts orientation of emerging leaders
About 185 people including 60 lecturers and 125 student leaders are participating in the training.
Some of the students attending orientation workshop of Makerere University leadership. (Photos by Mpalanyi Ssentongo)
NewVision Reporter
@NewVision
___________________________
The First Lady and the Minister of Education and Sports, Mrs Janet Museveni has started orienting emerging leaders.
The rollout was announced at the start of a three-day ((October 19-21, 2023) orientation workshop of Makerere University leadership and the students’ guild at Esella Hotel in Kira Municipality in Wakiso district on Thursday.
“We are thrilled to announce to you the rolling out of the Emerging Leaders Programme (ELP), an initiative of the First Lady, Hon. Janet Kataaha Museveni, to give participants exposure to the program content to enlist them as one of the programme participants or implementors during its course of implementation,” the joint statement by the programme implementing partners partly reads.
About 185 people including 60 lecturers and 125 student leaders are participating in the training.
The initiative, according to the statement, is a life skills programme, aiming to foster character mindset change to influence the present and shape the future of the nation.
The First Lady has since formed a task force comprising Life Ministry Uganda and the Global Leadership Summit in Uganda, which is a leadership development institution to work in collaboration with Makerere University to implement the programme.
Mrs. Museveni, while inaugurating the Makerere University Council on February 2, 2023, implored its members to join her and implement a national anti-corruption and HIV/AIDS campaign, starting with Makerere University in the bid to raise a dignified generation of youth in Uganda.
The SAFE Campaign
It is out of this that the ELP initiative was born to pursue the First Lady’s dream. It is a capacity-building and behavioral intervention coded, “The SAFE Campaign.”
The SAFE campaign enlists a series of innovative lifestyle and communication interventions aimed at improving the knowledge, motivation, and risk perceptions, skills, norms, and supportive environment of morality and integrity to correspondingly transform the university’s outputs on education and economic development.
The programme is also geared at raising awareness among students about the need to reach out to their communities in light of combating corruption, HIV/AIDS, and substance and Internet abuse among other challenges.
“We shall be looking at helping young people and promoting a corruption-free environment at the university, but also enabling young people to take on the values of stewardship, integrity, and servant leadership that result in them looking at their lives as meant to honour God by shunning corruption and being faithful with the resources at their exposure,” Betty Byanyima, the executive director of the Global Leadership Summit in Uganda, said.
She added that issues to do with alcohol abuse and addiction to drugs which continue to negatively impact the education of young people were a target of the campaign.
According to health reports lots of addictions among young people are heavily contributing to the worrying prevalence rates of mental health degeneration with some cases resulting in suicide
“The financial aspect of the campaign addresses issues of lack of integrity and bad stewardship of resources that leads to corruption. Some of the university students go ahead to misuse the hard-earned school fees by their parents and they even fail to graduate. There is corruption in the academics where young people are involved in many malpractices,” she said.
Holistic education
Bishop Joshua Lwere, the former overseer of the Association of Pentecostals and Evangelicals in Uganda, lauded the first lady for entrusting them with the mandate of instilling morals into the young people.
“To impact the young people, you have to start with the young people and Makerere being the first university, everything starts there, then we shall get to the other public and private universities. We want to help these emerging leaders to stand against temptations that come with moral decadence,” he said.
In this drive; “We are dealing with holistic education which is the head, heart, hands, and house. Head has to be the academics, the heart has to do with the character and morals, hands have to do with skills and the house has to do with our community responsibility.”
The deputy vice-chancellor in charge of finance and administration at Makerere University, Prof. Henry Mwanaki Alinaitwe, welcomed the campaign saying education is not only about academics but also other aspects of life.
“We support efforts to eliminate HIV and corruption in Uganda on top of fighting alcohol, drug abuse, and so on. We think if we can change the young leaders we can help these others to understand and change society,” he said.
The guild president of Makerere University, Robert Maseruka, said changing the mindset of emerging or young leaders will shape the politics of the country.
“We shall do away with corruption as early as possible and indiscipline with in line with sexuality,” he said.
Comments
1 Comment
Paul Kilimi Wanda
This is a good gesture to interact with citizens so that they may grasp what government wants, how it should be done, what should be done where it should be done etcetera.
20/10/2023