After years of piling up paper files, the Education Service Commission (ESC) will soon phase out its manual operations and demand that applicants for a job in the sector resort to electronic applications. The move to electronic means will ease the commission's ability to detect forgeries in applications and employment records.

Uganda joins the rest of Africa to mark the Africa Public Service Day, an annual event that recognizes value and virtue of service to the community. The objective is to raise the image of public service, thus enhance trust in government, collect, document and share best practices for possible replication within a country as well as across the African Continent.

Makerere University Deputy Vice Chancellor in charge of Academics has said they are investigating circumstances under which the names of some students appeared on a recent graduation list yet they had not met the minimum academic requirements.
The Deputy Vice Chancellor said the university is doing an evaluation check on the records system to find out how the anomaly could have come about.

The Ministry of Education has said it is overwhelmed by the number of teachers who gained employment using forged documents. The Director of Basic Education said that a survey found that all districts in Eastern Uganda have several cases of forgeries. The same has been discovered in the Central region as investigations continue in other parts of the country.

People in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda have been found buying fake degrees of all sorts from diploma mills and other bogus universities. Those universities have no physical existence and operate only through websites. Most diploma mills are operating from Britain or United States where academic standards are presumed to be very high. Recently, the Federal Bureau of Investigations compiled a list of over 10,000 persons who obtained fake degrees from diploma mills in USA. A significant number of them are from South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria. Currently, there are about 80 notorious diploma mills that operate from the United States and the UK.

The National Council for Higher Education has ordered the closure of Luweero University and Central Buganda University (CBU). The council also says Namasagali and Fairland Universities have up to December to improve their facilities or face closure. The council's deputy executive director said they had written to the Inspector General of Police to effect the closure. "Luweero University and CBU are illegal and any student who goes there does so at his or her own risk. The council does not recognise them as universities and we have requested the Police to close them down." Both Luweero and CBU have over 2,000 students studying Business Administration, Social Work and Social Administration as well as Computer Science.

Makarere University, in Uganda, one of the most prestigious universities in Africa may revoke 200 degrees awarded in the past years after an internal committee charged with investigating academic fraud, discovered that students have been enrolled without any evidence that they met admissions criteria.

After several media reports that thousands of the Makerere university's alumni are potential fraudsters, several employers are contacting the transcript office for verification of academic documents. According to an officer at the Academic Registrar's office, bankers, customs officials and journalists have forged their paths to jobs they should never have had at all.

The Parliament has decided that schools cannot charge any money from students benefiting from the Universal Secondary Education scheme. The committee also wanted answers on examination malpractices, leakages and cancelled 'O' level results. It decided that when a candidate is deemed to have cheated in one paper, the candidate loses the whole examination.

Results from last year's Uganda Certificate of Education exams show that 2,742 students have not obtained their exam due to cheating, and seven schools lost examination center status. Even in the employment sector many executives' qualifications have been found wanting least of all in professions as lofty as law. A judge had to resign for forging academic papers in the 1990s.