Gulu University has been cited among ten public universities with recurring operational inefficiencies in a new audit report released by the Auditor General, Edward Akol, on December 31, 2025.
The report, covering the three-year period ending December 31, 2025, identifies Gulu and Busitema as public universities that consistently exhibited inefficiencies.
The Auditor General attributed the shortcomings not to institutional size, enrolment levels, or resource constraints, but to internal management weaknesses, poor supervision systems, and suboptimal utilisation of available resources.
According to the audit, delayed completion of graduate programmes remains one of the key factors undermining operational efficiency across public universities.
“The low participation in research activities across the universities was attributed to inadequate mentoring structures, limited training in proposal development, and weak incentives for junior researchers,” the AG stated in the report.
The audit found that 1,019 graduate students from Makerere University, Kyambogo University, Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST), and Gulu University exceeded the standard two-year postgraduate study duration.
Low academic staff participation in research activities was also flagged as a major concern. At Gulu University, only 11 out of 259 academic staff, representing just 4 percent, published research.
Other universities recorded similarly low publication rates: Kabale University had 28 out of 320 staff (9 percent), Kyambogo University 70 out of 418 staff (17 percent), and Lira University had 22 out of 116 staff (19 percent).
Akol has called for stronger internal management controls, improved supervision of graduate students, better coordination of research activities, and deliberate strategies to promote research dissemination and staff participation across public universities.
The audit further painted weak research management and poor completion of funded research projects, despite significant government investment through the Research and Innovation Fund (RIF).
The Auditor General noted that completion rates for funded projects remained “extremely low” across universities.
The government sunk a total of 2.65 trillion in the ten public universities, supplemented by a 32 percent increase in staffing and a 49 percent expansion in infrastructure and significant investments.
However, the report indicated that although universities are spending more money each year, the results they produce are not increasing at the same pace.
“Research outputs declined sharply from an average of 204.8 to 76.23 over the same period,” the report noted.
The audit cites cases at Makerere University, MUST, and Busitema University where some researchers were listed on more than four concurrent projects but delivered no completed outputs within the planned timeframes.
The audit report is part of the value for money assessment conducted by the Auditor General in ten Public Universities across the country in the period of over the three financial years of 2022/23 and 2024/25.
The report highlights the need for public universities to improve their research management, supervision, and dissemination strategies to achieve better outcomes and justify the significant investments made by the government.