The administrator as a change agent: an overview

It is agreed that administration has a major leadership role to fulfill in the work of the agency or organisation. The following are some of the major areas within which administration should take leadership

Discordant responses to antiretroviral treatment: prevalence, risk factors and associated mortality in Rwanda

Mexico AIDS Conference 200

Making Women\u27s Land Rights a Reality in Uganda: Advocacy for Co-Ownership by Spouses

There is a human face to the problem of women and land reform in Uganda. The following stories are typical of the plight of women in many rural areas of Uganda and indicate why women\u27s land rights are high on the agenda of the women\u27s movement in Uganda

Statutory Law, Patriarchy and Inheritance: Home ownership among Widows in Uganda

This paper discusses the ways in which urban widows in Uganda are deprived of home ownership upon the death of their husbands. It is based on a qualitative research conducted in the middle-income areas of Kampala between 2004 and 2007. The results show that the institutional legal framework and the patriarchal customary practices and beliefs deprivewidows of home ownership notwithstanding the gender sensitive Constitution. The study also shows that the special ways in which widows are able to inherit the matrimonial home upon the death of their husbands demonstrate the difficulty widows face to become home owners.Keywords: Home ownership; inheritance; Ugandan constitution; patriarchy; customary la

Manager Onboarding to Improve Retention, Knowledge, and Confidence to Lead

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on manager onboarding best practices and their impact on turnover intention, knowledge, and confidence to lead teams in primary healthcare settings. Background: Primary care onboarding is often insufficient due to competing operational priorities, time constraints, lack of mentorship, and cost. With primary care increasingly the setting for affordable, coordinated, end-to-end patient care, primary care managers must be well-prepared to lead the care team. Methods: A review of the literature identified best onboarding practices associated with job satisfaction and turnover, reduced time to proficiency, increased knowledge, and confidence to lead. Findings: Appropriate onboarding can shorten the new manager’s time to proficiency, increase job satisfaction, and reduce turnover. Content-specific to onboarding managers in the primary care setting was not found. Conclusion: Strong connections exist between structured onboarding practices and improved job satisfaction, retention, and performance. Empirical research is needed to validate best practices and their impact on outcomes, specifically, role-specific onboarding for managers in primary care

Of Fundamental Change and No Change: Pitfalls of Constitutionalism and Political Transformation in Uganda, 1995-2005

With Uganda’s turbulent and traumatic post-independence political experience, the take-over of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) in 1986 ushered in a tide of unprecedented hope for political transformation and constitutionalism. NRM’s ten-point programme, pledge for a ‘fundamental change’, climaxing in the formulation of a new constitution in 1995, encapsulated the state-social contract and hope for the new order. But ten years later, Uganda’ political landscape and power architecture continued to show that political transformation and constitutionalism were still illusory. This article examines political development in Uganda during the first ten years under the new constitution and time of democratic reforms in Africa. The article shows that these years pointed to political reversals epitomised by the preponderance of abuse of human rights, state failures and loss of hope in the war-ravaged north, patrimonialism, autocratic tendencies, and manipulations which were reminiscent of the old dictatorships. The last straw came with the shocking amendment of the embryonic constitution to remove presidential term limits, which were entrenched as a lynch-pin for a smooth transfer of power. This was followed by the military siege of the High Court that crowned the reality that militarism remained the anchor of power in Uganda’s body politic. The independence of the judiciary and legislature remained illusory, as together with the opposition they remained susceptible to bribery, manipulation, intimidation and repression. With an unpredictable constitutionalism and political terrain, the NRM’s promise of a ‘fundamental change’ degenerated into ‘no change’

A linguistic analysis of Rukiga personal names

The goal of the paper is to provide a linguistic description of the structure of personal names in a lesser studied Bantu language of Uganda, Rukiga (JE14). Data show that Rukiga personal names are presented as lexical entities but with underlying elaborate grammatical structures derived from the syntax, morphology, phonology and the lexicon of the language. Personal names in Rukiga form a special category of nouns derived from nouns, adjectives, verbs, phrases, clauses and full sentences. This study establishes that truncation, affixal derivation, lexicalization of phrases, clauses and sentences are employed in name-formation. The study further reveals that the socio-cultural context influences the semantics and structure of names in Rukiga. Data for this study were collected in Kabale district in western Uganda through interviewing older persons, reviewing religious documents and tax collection registers. The study mirrors personal names as a part of the grammar of Rukiga reflecting the general complex linguistic system of the language. Data from this study is envisaged to contribute to typological and theoretical analyses of personal names which have internal morphosyntactic properties

A knowledge acquisition tool to assist case authoring from texts.

Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is a technique in Artificial Intelligence where a new problem is solved by making use of the solution to a similar past problem situation. People naturally solve problems in this way, without even thinking about it. For example, an occupational therapist (OT) that assesses the needs of a new disabled person may be reminded of a previous person in terms of their disabilities. He may or may not decide to recommend the same devices based on the outcome of an earlier (disabled) person. Case-based reasoning makes use of a collection of past problem-solving experiences thus enabling users to exploit the information of others successes and failures to solve their own problem(s). This project has developed a CBR tool to assist in matching SmartHouse technology to the needs of the elderly and people with disabilities. The tool makes suggestions of SmartHouse devices that could assist with given impairments. SmartHouse past problem-solving textual reports have been used to obtain knowledge for the CBR system. Creating a case-based reasoning system from textual sources is challenging because it requires that the text be interpreted in a meaningful way in order to create cases that are effective in problem-solving and to be able to reasonably interpret queries. Effective case retrieval and query interpretation is only possible if a domain-specific conceptual model is available and if the different meanings that a word can take can be recognised in the text. Approaches based on methods in information retrieval require large amounts of data and typically result in knowledge-poor representations. The costs become prohibitive if an expert is engaged to manually craft cases or hand tag documents for learning. Furthermore, hierarchically structured case representations are preferred to flat-structured ones for problem-solving because they allow for comparison at different levels of specificity thus resulting in more effective retrieval than flat structured cases. This project has developed SmartCAT-T, a tool that creates knowledge-rich hierarchically structured cases from semi-structured textual reports. SmartCAT-T highlights important phrases in the textual SmartHouse problem-solving reports and uses the phrases to create a conceptual model of the domain. The model then becomes a standard structure onto which each semi-structured SmartHouse report is mapped in order to obtain the correspondingly structured case. SmartCAT-T also relies on an unsupervised methodology that recognises word synonyms in text. The methodology is used to create a uniform vocabulary for the textual reports and the resulting harmonised text is used to create the standard conceptual model of the domain. The technique is also employed in query interpretation during problem solving. SmartCAT-T does not require large sets of tagged data for learning, and the concepts in the conceptual model are interpretable, allowing for expert refinement of knowledge. Evaluation results show that the created cases contain knowledge that is useful for problem solving. An improvement in results is also observed when the text and queries are harmonised. A further evaluation highlights a high potential for the techniques developed in this research to be useful in domains other than SmartHouse. All this has been implemented in the Smarter case-based reasoning system

Gender dynamics in home ownership in Kampala, Uganda

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 318-329).This study explores the different ways in which married women in Kampala, Uganda are unable to become homeowners during marriage and at widowhood. In the process, the study also explores the special mechanisms through which married women became homeowners through marriage and at widowhood. The study was premised on the assumption that gender inequality in homeownership exists and persists in Uganda in spite of urbanization, increase in information flow, education and income of women. Although married women live in a home with their husband, they do not actually own the home. As a result, women tend to be users rather than owners. Although one would expect statutory law to guarantee married women home ownership rights during marriage, this is not the case. While Uganda’s state policy states that every citizen has the right to own property, in particular houses, there is no legal framework that guarantees married women equal ownership rights of the home. The current Marriage and Divorce Acts are not clear on the benefits of the married woman in the matrimonial home during marriage and divorce. At divorce the married woman’s benefits in the matrimonial home is at the discretion of the judge who determines the percentage of a married woman’s entitlement to the matrimonial home upon proof of evidence the married woman presents. The Domestic Relations Bill that would address the unequal gender relations in homeownership and probably guarantee married women benefits in the matrimonial home has never been passed. Though a number of NGOs and civil society organizations have lobbied Parliament to pass the Domestic Relations Bill, no progress has been made. Similarly, while one would expect a widow to automatically inherit the matrimonial home upon the death of her husband, intestate law of succession guarantees the widow only user rights of the home until she dies or remarries. The matrimonial home belongs to the eldest son of the diseased. Although the Constitutional Court recently declared some of the clauses in intestate succession law unconstitutional, Parliament is yet to come up with a new succession law. The research applied Hirdman’s gender system and contract theory to explain the complex gender dynamics in homeownership. The study explores the relationship between married women and their husbands and unmarried women and married male adulterers. The analysis of married women dynamics highlights the different gender contracts that exist between married and unmarried women. Two suburban middleincome areas, namely Banda and Kiwatule were chosen from which urban women were identified and interviewed about the challenges they face to become homeowners in their own right. The study was based on purely a qualitative design. The data were collected through life stories of unmarried women, married couples, and widows. The study reveals that while married men adulterers are not concerned to have their names included on the title deeds of their female lovers’ homes, ironically married men ensure that the matrimonial home is solely registered in their names regardless of whether or not their wives contribute to the construction costs. Married women were unable to become homeowners due to lack of regular income, lack of awareness, and patriarchal male cultural beliefs. The study reveals that it is only under special circumstances that married women are able to become homeowners an indication of male dominancy in home ownership. In some cases married women are able to become homeowners when a husband is absent at the time of purchase and registration of the plot of land on which the matrimonial home is built. In other cases married women become homeowners when their husbands need their income as a contribution to the home project or when they are in a financial crisis. Married women with nothing to contribute to the home project find it difficult to negotiate for homeownership rights. Divorce and separation case laws show that married women whose names do not appear on the title deed are at the mercy of the Court for beneficial rights in the home. However, in cases where the married woman moves out and leaves behind the husband in the home, it becomes difficult to evict him even when the court rules in her favour