Uganda

The fifth session of the African Internet Resilience webinar series took place on 30 July. The focus of the session was to foster a deeper understanding of complementary networks and address the need for internet services in rural and underserved areas across the continent.

During RightsCon 2020, the Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) hosted a session on non-consensual sharing of intimate images (NCII), a form of online violence that is on the rise in Uganda and other sub-Saharan African countries, commonly referred to as “revenge porn”.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown why the protection of human rights online is more important now than ever before. The internet has been a gateway for access to critical information, services and opportunities available to many people for the first time, as noted by the GSMA mobile gender gap report.

This article analyses the challenge of internet access faced by women and other marginalised groups such as persons with disabilities in Uganda during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Uganda, social media is one of the avenues for disseminating information on COVID-19 to citizens. however, the effectiveness has been undermined by the social media tax, which requires telecom subscribers to pay a daily subscription in order to access popular social media platforms.

The Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) warns of the proliferation of COVID-19-related fake news on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as other ways in which misinformation is spread in rural areas.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, people everywhere are asked to cease physical interactions and the internet has become the lifeline for the work of human rights defenders currently working from home. What does this mean in Uganda, a country with low internet access?

This report presents the findings from an evidence-based study that examines the gendered aspects to women’s internet access on mobile broadband connections in Uganda.