About the Uganda Governance Monitor

What the Monitor is

The Uganda Governance Monitor is a running, public record of governance incidents in Uganda, kept by CEGER (Centre for Governance and Environmental Research). Each incident has a date, a place, a category, the people affected where they are reported, and the sources it rests on. The record is being extended back to January 2020 and is updated as new incidents are reported.

What it tries to achieve

• One place for the record. Incidents reported across many outlets, on many days, in one searchable record with the source for every entry.
• Patterns over time and place. Where incidents happen, how often, and how that changes, for citizens, journalists, researchers, policymakers and oversight bodies.
• Clarity about what is known. Every incident says how well it is established, and where credible accounts differ the competing accounts are set out side by side.

What counts as a governance incident

Twelve categories: election related; electoral malpractice; violence and conflict; protest and civil unrest; civic space and media freedom; corruption and abuse of office; justice and court rulings; policy and legislation; international relations; international actions concerning Uganda; humanitarian crises; and environmental issues with a governance side (for example the enforcement of fishing or charcoal rules).

How the data is collected

• Sources. Ugandan and international news outlets, official records (court rulings, the Uganda Gazette, Parliament's Hansard, the Auditor General, the Electoral Commission) and statements by human rights organisations.
• Reading. Articles are gathered every day and read with the help of software that drafts each incident: what happened, where, when, who was involved and the numbers reported, with the sentence in the source that supports each number.
• Review. Nothing is published by the software. A CEGER editor checks every draft against its sources before it appears. Incidents involving deaths, ten or more arrests, a named person accused of wrongdoing, or conflicting accounts are always read in full; others are checked in batches with a random sample.
• Wording. Descriptions are written in our own words and attribute claims to whoever made them ("police said", "according to the Daily Monitor"). The same standard applies to the state, the ruling party and the opposition.

Evidence flags

• Verified: confirmed by a Nation Media Group report (Daily Monitor, NTV Uganda, nation.africa), by two independent credible outlets, or by an official record. Nation Media Group reports are accepted on their own because they are often the only outlets that report human rights violations in Uganda.
• Single source: reported by one credible outlet and not yet confirmed by another. It is not a judgement that the report is wrong.
• Official claim: a statement by an official or institution that could not be checked independently, for example figures on detentions when detention sites are closed to independent observers. The claim is recorded as a claim, attributed, and counted in the totals.
• Disputed: credible sources give conflicting accounts of who was involved, how many people were affected, or whether it happened as described.
• Corrected: an earlier version of the entry was wrong and has been corrected; the correction is noted on the incident.

The Verified only switch leaves out single-source and disputed incidents from the map, the totals and the table.

Limits

• The record shows what was reported. Some places, above all Kampala, are covered far more than rural districts, so a district with few incidents may simply be one with little reporting.
• Counts of people killed, injured or detained are those reported at the time; they can change, and some cannot be confirmed.
• An incident without a district (a national law, a statement, a ruling) counts in the totals and the timeline but has no marker on the map.

Disclaimer

The Monitor compiles information from published news reports and official records. CEGER does not vouch for the accuracy or completeness of that information: each entry is only as reliable as the sources it cites, and the evidence flags describe how well an incident is established, not a finding by CEGER that it happened as reported. Inclusion of an incident is not an allegation by CEGER against any person, party or institution. CEGER accepts no responsibility for conclusions drawn from the data, or for decisions made on the basis of it; please read the sources and the caveats before relying on any entry.

Corrections and missing incidents

If an entry is wrong, or an incident is missing, write to ugmonitor@ceger.org with the link to the incident and your source. Every change to an entry is recorded.

Using the data

The data is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0): you may use and share it, including in your own work, if you credit "Uganda Governance Monitor, CEGER" and link to this page. The Data view has a download of the current selection.