(AFP) Phiona Mutesi happened upon chess as a famished nine-year-old foraging for food in the sprawling and impoverished slums of the Ugandan capital.

"I was very hungry," said Mutesi, aged about 18.

Now a chess champion who competes internationally, her tale of triumph over adversity is being turned into a Hollywood epic with Oscar-winning Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong'o tipped to play her mother.

"My dad had died, and after the age of three we started struggling to get food to eat, my mum was...

Kampala (AFP) - Just as he attends church on Sunday morning, there's another sacred place Nick, a 23-year-old Kampala stylist, flocks to every Sunday night."It gives me fuel for the whole week," he says, standing beer in hand outside an inconspicuous bar, in a red check shirt and jeans."When I come here I don't mind if I miss sleep and then go to work, because I go to work feeling happy, new. It's a beautiful Sunday."During the week this pub, located in the capital's business district but away f...

From all across Rwanda, and even parts of neighbouring Burundi, people flock to the southern town of Butare to a little shop called Inzozi Nziza (Sweet Dreams). They come for a taste of the unknown, something most have never tasted – the sweet, cold, velvety embrace of ice-cream.Here, at the central African country's first ice-cream parlour, customers can buy scoops in sweet cream, passion fruit, strawberry and pineapple flavours. Toppings include fresh fruit, honey, chocolate chips and granola....

“I was so scared,” says Rita. “I’d never heard about this happening. I had no choice but to pull out an exercise book and tear out a page,” she says, standing in the scorching school playground and speaking through a translator. “Then a friend gave me a sweater, and I tied it around my waist.”Research shows one in 10 African girls skip school during menstruation or drop out entirely because they don’t have access to sanitary pads or tampons. “Women and girls use paper, leaves, old clothes and ot...

Phiona Mutesi happened upon chess as a nine-year-old in the sprawling and impoverished Katwe slum of the Ugandan capital, Kampala.Now a chess champion who competes internationally, her story is being turned into a Hollywood film with Oscar-winning Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o tipped to play her mother.Back in 2005, Mutesi discovered a chess program held in a church in the Katwe slum districts in Kampala. Potential players were enticed with a free cup of porridge, and Mutesi began organising her...

Hospice figurehead Anne Merriman says the 'British problem' is that 'curing comes before caring' At the age of 87, when many people would be putting their feet up, British former nun Dr Anne Merriman MBE is writing several books to pass on her expertise in providing pain relief to millions around the world.“The team get upset with me because I keep saying ‘I’ve got to get this done before I pop my clogs’ and they say ‘you’re going to live to be 100,” says Ms Merriman from Uga...

Huge potholes and rundown hospitals are actually getting fixed, thanks to a cartoonist’s online satire aimed at the government.Ugandan cartoonist Jim Spire Ssentongo didn’t know what he was starting last April when he sent out a tweet encouraging people to post photos of the ubiquitous potholes across the country’s capital.
“A friend of mine is organising a mega KAMPALA POTHOLE PHOTO EXHIBITION” he wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on April 15 last year. “Share here photos of p...

KAMPALA, Uganda, Nov 24 2015 (IPS) - This week Pope Francis is making his first trip to Africa in his as leader of the Catholic church. While mass excitement is building in the three host countries, Kenya, Uganda and the Central African Republic (CAR),among people of all religions not everyone is in the mood to celebrate.

Sandra Ntebi, 33, a gay Ugandan “human rights defender,” lives on the outskirts of Kampala where the Pope will meet local residents. Papal routes have been paved and lit for...

Ugandan broadcasters calling themselves “rap-orters” are changing the way news is delivered, after a team of hip-hop artists teamed up to deliver a weekly TV bulletin.“Uganda’s anti-gay law is making news/Some countries have found it befitting to accuse/Uganda of treating gays as German Jews/Nothing to gain from this and more to lose,” they rapped in a recent episode of NewzBeat, broadcast on NTV, one of the country’s most-watched channels.The song addresses a controversial law signed by Ugandan...

A court ruling on the controversial “export” of nearly 300 Ugandan doctors to the Caribbean was postponed as the Ugandan government defended the move, bizarrely claiming it was simply trying to help prevent those seeking greener pastures from ending up in trouble.
Uganda’s government drew flak after it recently advertised posts for 283 local health professionals to apply for jobs in Trinidad and Tobago.
A Ugandan think-tank, the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), is asking for the final...

By Amy Fallon*
[caption id="attachment_16525" align="alignleft" width="300"] Gerald Abila's tech-savvy legal aid project, Barefoot Law, has helped hundreds of thousands with advice (AFP Photo/Isaac Kasamani)[/caption]
Kampala (AFP) - When revealing photographs of a Ugandan student were leaked online in a case of revenge porn, it left her terrified she herself might face criminal charges under tough new laws.
With the photographs then printed in tabloid newspapers following repeated threats, the...

Raymond Mwesiga's "darling kid sister" had much to live for, but when she needed medical help after a car crash, Uganda's overstretched health system fatally failed her. Distracted by her toddler while driving her new car, 22-year-old Sandra Mbabazi had a "minor" accident and didn't seem to be badly hurt. A passerby took her to a private health facility in Buwama, some 65 kilometres (40 miles) from Uganda's capital Kampala. "She had internal bleeding and needed quick attention," Mwesiga, 34, tol...

KAMPALA, May 29 2014 (IPS) - When Gerald Abila received an iPhone as a gift almost two years ago, the Ugandan law student didn’t just use it to text his friends. He used it to create what would eventually become the first entity of its kind in East Africa — a tech savvy, multi-award winning, organisation that uses Facebook, Twitter, SMSes, and radio and television partnerships to provide free legal advice and consultations.
“I’d be in class but at the same time I was Tweeting and on Facebook,”...

After months and months of broadcasting “Tory MP after Tory MP after Tory MP, two leaders of the Brexit Party and hardly any Labour MPs”, as veteran British journalist Michael Crick described it in November last year, there was a golden opportunity for a change in programming at GB News.

Nigel Farage, also known as “Mr Brexit”, had taken the week off from the free-to-air news and current affairs channel.

There were “67 million” possible fill-ins, says Crick, a regular GB News guest and former...

A loss for Julian Assange in his final appeal against extradition to the United States this week would be the end of the road for him within the British legal system and, his supporters argue, a death sentence.

The WikiLeaks co-founder has been incarcerated in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison since April 11, 2019, when he was dragged out of the Embassy of Ecuador in London, where he’d sought asylum. The man who now faces an 18-count indictment over his alleged role in one of the largest l...

When popular philanthropist “MrBeast,” also known as Jimmy Donaldson, announced a mission “to make the world a better place” by supporting orphanages worldwide in February, he got nearly five million views on YouTube in just a fortnight. But as pointed out by NGO Lumos, who work to end the dangers of institutionalization and help children be reunited with family, “decades of scientific research shows that children need to grow up in a safe and loving environment, surrounded by family to help the...

Around 200,000 refugees escaping from conflict in South Sudan have made their home in Bidi Bidi, Uganda When residents of Bidi Bidi, one of the world’s largest refugee camps, were asked what they wanted at their new home the answer was surprising: it was somewhere to dance.“During dancing we see there is some love, some happiness,” says Mawa Zacharia Erezenio. In 2016 he became one of hundreds of thousands who fled to what had been a small village in north-western Uganda to e...

As a court in Uganda refused to strike down one of the world’s harshest anti-gay laws enacted nearly a year ago, activists fear the law there and the “lackluster” response to it from donors will spur on other countries considering similar harsh legislation. The Constitutional Court of Uganda on Wednesday rejected the nullification of The Anti-Homosexuality Act in its entirety, scrapping just two sections and two subsections and declaring the rest of the law constitutional. The ruling, which had...

When Canadian non-binary and queer author Ronnie Riley discovered they’d been “shadow banned” last November they were horrified. But it was a matter of sooner rather than later.
“I felt absolutely horrible, but I knew it was a possibility,” said the Toronto-based writer, who spent several years trying to get their debut novel aimed at middle graders, Jude Saves the World, published. In the book, 12-year-old protagonist Jude Winters is non-binary and has ADHD. “I’ve experienced my share of transp...

KAMPALA, Uganda— Today’s problems require more than prayer, Bishop Wisdom K. Peter told a crowd gathered on the outskirts of Uganda’s capital, Kampala. You need a prophet, he said. After that introduction, in steps 45-year-old Prophet Elvis Mbonye, worth an estimated $115 million. He’s one of the country’s most talked about prophets amid claims that a variety of his predictions have come true, from the restoration of broken laptops to the election of U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016 and Brexi...

When the Paris Peace Forum nonprofit began working on pandemic preparedness to support the global health community's efforts in the COVID-19 response, they discovered a “profound and entirely understandable sense of injustice” expressed by the scientists in Botswana and South Africa who identified the omicron variant. “They had discovered and provided the world with the knowledge and data to combat these pathogens, yet they were the last to access medical products deriving from their discovery,”...

When NGO GNP+, the Global Network of People Living with HIV, embarked on its 2021 search for not one but two bosses for what one of its co-leaders now calls an “arranged marriage,” their board chair was doubtful.

“When role-share was first suggested as an alternative model of leadership I had questions — will this be efficient, what about egos, will it cause confusion with external representation?” said Jacquelyne Alesi, the chair of the GNP+ board, on the organization’s site. “However, having looked at the idea in more detail I now see co-leadership through a new lens of mutual accountability, flexibility, and support — all central to a feminist leadership model.”

Having been named the ‘world’s most liveable’ city too many times to count, Vancouver already had an impressively stocked trophy cabinet when it was crowned the globe’s ‘most friendly city’ in 2019. Cut to 2022 and another poll rolls around, this time ranking Ryan Reynolds’ hometown in the worst places for expats to live. Apparently the city was now full of not-so-friendly locals. 
While planning a trip to Vancouver last year, a place I’d dreamed of visiting, I pored over all these views/ranking...

In 2012 and 2013, during a massive explosion of online Sikh education, one man had a vision. The late Bhai Jagrai Singh was an Oxford graduate and former British Army officer who gave up a successful finance career to found the Sikh Press Association in London one year later. Today SikhPA provides multi-platform content including editorial copy, news, images, infographics, video content, listing information and data to journalists and newsrooms all around the world.

A news agency for a faith that isn’t bigger than one per cent of the population of any country such as the UK, Canada or Australia, where there are the largest numbers of Sikhs outside India, and run by a team of just two is a big deal. The news agency has provided
coverage of the 2020 and 2021 farmer’s protest against three laws passed by the Indian Parliament, and the assassination of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada in October 2023.

Deepa Singh, also known as Kaldip Singh Lehal is the founder of the group Sikh Youth UK who was arrested at Gatwick airport while returning to the UK and subjected to a humiliating detainment and “interrogation…like a terrorist”, he claims, under the
government’s  counterterror law in December. He’s also given Sikh PA interviews. “If it weren’t for the Sikh Press Association, a lot of Sikh voices,
especially ours wouldn't be heard,” says Deepa.

But “censorship and targeted interference remain barriers” to the agency’s work, say Everything 13 (E13), the charity that Bhai Jagrai

Singh started to launch projects like Sikh PA. Its press officers have received threatening phone calls after covering certain issues, while online death threats are a frequent occurrence says Jasveer Singh. Originally from the UK, he’s now based in British Columbia (BC), Canada, which has a large Sikh population, working for the agency from there. “There have also been character attacks which involve tarnishing the reputation of staff, legal threats and even efforts to have the association labelled an extremist organisation,” says Jasveer.

He says that while some of those behind these may be “Indian nationalist bots” and some may not be real people, “if they’re willing to threaten someone like me, then the people that are active who are bringing thousands together to be part of this movement…they want them killed”. A former staff member was also prevented from entering India because of his journalism, says Jasveer.
Because the West “became apathetic to Indian interference, overlooking it for trade deals,” borders do not keep the community safe, he explains. As support for Khalistan and criticism of India has increased and India has stepped up its efforts to silence activists, enclaves in the diaspora where violent criminal Indian nationalist gangs work have appeared, he claims.

“But Sikh faith is entwined with tales of courage and sacrifice,” says Jasveer adding that carrying out the work of Bhai Jagrai Singh, who died in 2017 age just 39, is a “task of honour”. “We are the voice for the voiceless, a megaphone for the unheard of our community,” says
Jasveer. “That must continue regardless.”