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The National Police say more complaints have been lodged against higher education institutions that are alleged to have issued fake degrees since the Research and Technology and Higher Education Ministry filed a report against one such institution last month. The National Police’s detective division chief said that they were currently looking into reports from the Medan Police in North Sumatra which targeted the University of North Sumatra.

The medical faculty at the University of Sydney will review one of its study units after an academic scandal which involved students falsifying records and interviewing dead patients. A spokeswoman for the university announced it would review its year-long Integrated Population Medicine (IPM), after it was revealed students had falsified reports that were supposed to document the experience of patients living with chronic diseases.

Accreditors keep hundreds of schools with low graduation rates or high loan defaults alive. Most colleges can’t keep their doors open without an accreditor’s seal of approval, which is needed to get students access to federal loans and grants. But accreditors hardly ever kick out the worst-performing colleges and lack uniform standards for assessing graduation rates and loan defaults.

The newly confirmed Assistant Education Minister for Fiscal Affairs and Human Resource Development, has vowed to work with his colleagues to increase the salaries and wages of educational officials across the country. He told senators that he will work with his colleagues to ensure a corruption- free educational system that is also brought up to a better standard, blaming the corruption in the system on low salaries for teachers and other officials.

Kampala. The procurement of big ticket and small projects from government is set for a complete overhaul as the service goes online. The Public Procurement Disposal of Public Assets Authority (PPDA), will launch the eGovernment Procurement portal, a web-based system that will see a migration away from the hand delivery of bids to government agencies.

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.

In a scam unearthed recently, for over 14 months, hundreds of public servants in Wakiso district in Uganda were receiving salaries many times higher than what they are entitled to under their grades. So far, 183 teachers have admitted to have benefitted from this payroll fraud amounting up to 2.3 billion Ugandan shillings.

A senior US official has called for independent verification of Afghan government figures on the use of US education aid following claims by Afghan ministers that the previous government had provided data on US-funded school and higher education projects that were flawed, tempered and exaggerated, and had interfered with university entrance exams. These allegations suggest the existence of ghost schools and teachers that are being paid for with US aid money.

Universities may attract penalty, including a freeze of grants, if its teachers are found to be guiding more than eight PhD students at any given point in time as part of a drive to plug lacunae in research. The University Grants Commission will ask all universities to have anti-plagiarism software to ensure that the thesis papers reflect genuine research. The step assumes significance against the backdrop of some agencies offering their services to research scholars to draft theses for them for a fee.

In an ongoing investigation into a cash-for-admissions racket, the enrolments of 1,080 students in a pre-medical course in Madhya Pradesh state in central India between 2009 and 2013 have been cancelled. The scam, initially exposed in 2013, and two recent high-profile deaths linked to it have sent shock waves across the country. Millions of rupees are believed to have changed hands in what some have described as India’s biggest-ever rigging case.