What drives me to help female students to thrive at my Ugandan university

Euzobia Mugisha Baine grew up watching the struggles of women such as her widowed mother, who fought with neighbours to keep the family’s land after Mugisha Baine’s father died. This formative experience inspired her to become a gender-equity champion.
Mugisha Baine is the director of gender mainstreaming at Makerere University in Kampala. She was hired by the university in 2000 as an assistant registrar, but within a year was recruited to lead the newly formed gender department in the registrar’s office, expanding it to a full directorate. Its mission is to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment and provide a safe educational environment, free of sexual harassment and violence, for everyone across the university’s ten colleges.
A gender and education researcher, she currently focuses on ways to make women’s leadership and decision-making more effective at Ugandan universities, particularly through action research, a methodology in which a researcher implements an intervention or social action and then analyses whether it produced the expected change.
Makerere’s Gender Equality Policy launched in 2009. It promotes gender equity in access to opportunities to apply for grants, scholarships and academic partnerships. The university has placed many women in top leadership and decision-making positions at Makerere and promoted gender equity in the sciences. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, a charitable foundation based in New York City, partnered with the university from 2001 to 2018 to sponsor underprivileged undergraduate women, with 70% of the funding earmarked for science students. Since 2020, a university policy has decreed that, for every cohort of students, neither men nor women can take more than 60% of the slots for any undergraduate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) degree programme. Here, Mugisha Baine tells Nature about her 20 years of trying to bridge the gender gap at Makerere.

Collection: Changemakers in science

My dad died when I was ten, and I saw my mother struggle to come up with school fees for ten children. But there was this particular incident of our neighbours trying to grab our land that bothered me. Why didn’t they try it when dad was still alive? I later learnt of similar cases when I worked with women’s organizations in the Luwero district in central Uganda and elsewhere. I then decided to get involved in women’s empowerment.
My time at university also revealed the gender disparity that exists in society. We had very few female lecturers.
The 1990s was a time of progress in Uganda. The current government of President Yoweri Museveni, who has championed women in government leadership and women’s education, had taken control in 1986, and the women’s rights movement was picking up. A friend convinced me to attend a function at the offices of Action for Development (ACFODE), a non-governmental organization in Kampala that promotes women’s empowerment. I interacted with female leaders I had heard about: the women’s rights activist and ACFODE co-founder Joy Kwesiga; geographer Victoria Mwaka; lawyer and activist Miria Matembe; and Maxine Ankrah, an African American social scientist. They gave talks and promoted the same idea that I had: women must be empowered everywhere, from the university to wider society. Kwesiga acted as my mentor — and I am who I am because of her.
Gender inclusion, with a focus on women’s career development, is now part of every activity at Makerere, whether as a component of undergraduate and graduate admissions, faculty career development or research partnerships. The number of female professors has increased from 2 in 2004, when the university did the first tally, to 11 full professors and 41 associate professors today. This includes the principal of the College of Health Sciences and the deans of the Medical School and the School of Public Health. Our scholarships for women doing postgraduate studies here include spousal and childcare support.
In 1990, the year in which I enrolled in university, Makerere introduced an affirmative-action policy that gave women applying to the university an extra 1.5 points on their entrance exams. However, that initiative and other gender-equity programmes have not yet led to significant increases in the number of women enrolled in the sciences at Ugandan universities. The 2020 policy stating that no more than 60% of STEM course slots can go to any one gender is very important for us to create a pool of female STEM graduates whom we can encourage to become scientists. Some of them will progress to master’s and doctoral studies.
You need to have a deep understanding of the area you want to specialize in, its history and the researchers you look up to. For a woman, multitasking is key when you have both a family and a career. If you want both, take whichever comes first. I had started having children earlier in life, and was able to get through my doctorate by 40.
The myth that the more academic qualifications or degrees someone has, the better they are as a leader. Many people use those qualifications to become professors, but some also want to use them to gain leadership positions. But many women are not achieving these qualifications because of factors, such as family caregiving responsibilities, that aren’t related to their professional capabilities. People can make assumptions about women’s careers and not understand the inherent social bias against women — and this keeps female scientists out of leadership positions.
I also wish people would take these underlying factors into account when looking at why young women tend to be less successful than their male peers at garnering leadership roles in business, politics or science.
When filling leadership positions, the focus should be more on a person’s integrity, ability to mobilize people and resources, communication skills and people skills.
It was a challenge to be away from my family from 2005 to 2007, during my PhD programme in gender and teacher education at the University of Birmingham, UK. My Commonwealth Scholarship, which funds students from the Commonwealth of Nations to study in the United Kingdom, had seemed comprehensive, including funding for my spouse and children — but the reality was totally different. For God’s sake, how do you raise children in Britain when you don’t even have enough to pay for their transportation from Uganda? In the end, I had to pay for myself to fly home to visit my family during those three years.
I had my fourth child at age 43, and many people think this was accidental. It was very much intentional, because I wanted to have six children in total. I ended up with five.