Service
Six things I have given my life to.
Each of them belongs to Rotary, not to me.
THE ROTARY PEACE CENTRE AT MAKERERE UNIVERSITY
The first Rotary Peace Centre in Africa — and Africa built it.
The problem
For most of the last century, peacebuilding in Africa was designed elsewhere and delivered here. Meanwhile tens of millions of people worldwide are displaced by conflict, violence or persecution, and a great many of them are our neighbours.
What we built
The Rotary Peace Centre at Makerere University opened in February 2020, the first of Rotary’s peace centres on the African continent. It trains peace fellows — practitioners already working in conflict prevention and resolution — through a postgraduate programme at one of Africa’s oldest universities. I serve on its advisory board.
Where it stands
The centre carries a cohort of peace fellows on full scholarship. Each fellowship costs a minimum of fifteen thousand US dollars. That is the arithmetic that keeps me awake: the centre is world-class, and it is funded year to year.
What is next
An endowment. A peace centre that has to be rescued every twelve months is not really established. Our target is to endow the centre so that the fellowships continue in perpetuity, without an annual scramble. This is the work I am proudest to be asking people to fund.
THE AFRICA PEACE CONCERT
Music that pays for peace.
I started the Africa Peace Concert because fundraising should not feel like a funeral. It is an annual hybrid music event, organised by Rotary in Uganda with The Rotary Foundation, and it exists for one purpose: to keep the Makerere Rotary Peace Centre standing. The target is half a million US dollars.
It has grown into one of the fixtures of the Rotary year in this region, and it has been attended by Rotary International Presidents. But the reason to come is simpler than that. You will have a very good evening, and a peace fellow you will never meet will finish her degree because you did.
MEDICINES FOR AFRICA
Two million people, and a factory that should not have been possible.
In 1997, seven of us started a pharmaceutical company in Katwe with ten million shillings each. The premise was that Africa should make its own medicine. Nobody believed it, which in my experience is often a good sign.
We brought in Cipla of India in 2004, broke ground in 2005, and commissioned the plant in 2007 — the first in sub-Saharan Africa certified to World Health Organization good manufacturing practice standards for antiretroviral medicines. It manufactures treatments for HIV and malaria. Those medicines keep close to two million people alive.
I include this on a Rotary website deliberately. Service is not only what you do on Saturdays. A business that solves a real problem is itself a form of service, and I would like more Rotarians to build one.
YOUTH, ROTARACT AND NEW CLUBS
Hand them the wheel earlier than is comfortable.
In March 2026 I launched a new institutional Rotary club at Ntare School, and returned later in the year to charter it formally. It will give its members a platform to develop leadership, strengthen fellowship and serve their communities — which is the whole proposition of Rotary, offered to people early enough for it to shape a life.
I am biased on this subject. Somebody invested in me at fourteen. Every argument I make about membership growth comes back to that.
If your school, university or institution wants to explore an Interact, Rotaract or institutional Rotary club, start on the For Clubs page.
CANCER CARE
Rotary in Uganda runs an annual Cancer Run which has funded the Rotary Cancer Centre at Nsambya Hospital, including a thirty-six-bed ward and two bunkers housing testing and treatment equipment. It is one of the clearest examples anywhere of what a Rotary district can build when it commits to one thing for a decade. I support it, I run it, and I would ask you to do both.