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Monday 9 August 2010

Latest guest post from Hugh O'Donnell MSP in Uganda

Today's been an odd one!

Duly turned up at my scheduled meeting with DfID to find that the person in charge of the Dept dealing with the Equalities Agenda had only arrived in Uganda two weeks before me, and had about the same level of knowledge on the situation regarding disabilities as I did.

None the less we spent nearly two hours kicking around the issues that had been identified during last weeks workshop with the VSO and the disability network here in Kampala.

All in all reasonably useful and a good start to the engagement process.

Uganda has some of the most comprehensive disability legislation in the world, it's even part of their Constitution but implementation is a huge challenge, mostly because of a combination of finance and cultural attitudes, which to be fair are changing-very slowly.

All of which takes me to my next meeting of the day.

The Uganda Elector Commission has responsibility for delivering the disability laws in relation to elections but they have been less than successful in meeting their obligations.

After three hours we managed to prise out of them a verbal agreement to work in partnership with VSO and disability network-but they still have no money so we may make a return visit to DfID with cap in hand.

The media stuff had to be rescheduled for Thursday!!!   That's Uganda. 

Oh,  the reason there are no pictures tonight is that everywhere we went to meetings there were very big policemen with very big guns discouraging us from taking photos-sometimes discretion is the better part of valour - so here's a genuine shot of the police  barrack instead!!!!

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