The Warren Nyamugasira Memorial Lecture Series begins!
On 23rd March 2017, civil society will honor the life and works of the late Warren Nyamugasira with the launch of the Warren Nyamugasira Memorial Lecture series.
His Life: Warren Nyamugasira was a leader of civil society in Uganda. Born in 1954, Nyamugasira attended Kihanga Boys primary school in Kabale and later in 1962 joined Kigezi High School for his secondary education. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Makerere University in 1978. In 1992 he enrolled at the University of Swansea in the United Kingdom, for a Master’s Degree in Economics.
He was a major figure in civil society organizations with over 35 years of experience in development work. He was among the team that established World Vision in Uganda and served as the first African Director for World Vision in Rwanda. He was also the Executive Director Uganda National NGO Forum between 2001 and 2008. By the time of his death, Nyamugasira was the Executive Director for Development Research and Training.
His Exceptional Service : He was known for exceptional service during his times and indeed defined the spirit of civil society thought leadership and intellectual discourse in Uganda for several generations. Through multiple watersheds in the country’s post-1986 story, Warren worked to make civil society what it is in Uganda and in the region. In his expositions mostly published in several newspaper regular articles and related publications in the public sphere, Warren successfully effected a difficult congruence between the imperatives of Uganda’s economic policy focus and Uganda’s implementation bottlenecks.
A stalwart in his understanding of economic policy, Warren’s prolific arguments for a just and citizen-led world order are a cornerstone of the intellectual tradition that he charted for subsequent generations of policy makers and strategic thinkers.
His works: A progenitor of Uganda’s civil society work on structural adjustment and poverty reduction, as well as Millennium Development Goals, his most enduring legacy is the coherent intellectual framework he helped provide for the country’s economic and social policy formulations from a civil society perspective. Although his unequivocal positions regularly generated controversy, the logical consistency of his suggestions unfailingly stood the test of reality. It is the mark of great minds that they most appropriately articulate the essence of their times and posit the correctness of the times to come. To that end, Warren’s contribution to Uganda’s strategic thought has been exceptional.
The Lecture Series: To pay tribute to individuals of such merit is necessarily a difficult task. It however is an obeisance that should be paid, to both, mark the lifetime of a remarkable individual and acknowledge the indelible imprint of his thought on civil society in Uganda. It is with this objective in view that Uganda National NGO Forum will institute the ‘Annual Warren Nyamugasira Memorial Lecture’ in 2016, to extol the remarkable contributions of this doyen of Uganda’s policy community to the intellectual tradition of Uganda.
UNNGOF hopes to establish, through this effort, a platform for the articulation of the nation’s most pertinent strategic concerns.
For more information please contact Michael Aboneka on 0779 201692 or at m.aboneka@ngoforum.or.ug
