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Uganda

In Uganda, located in eastern Africa, most people spend their lifetime developing, maintaining, and nurturing social relationships with others. This process of establishing strong social ties enhances Ugandan's access to critical resources needed for survival. Uganda is uniquely endowed with sociable, friendly people with strong extended family support systems that offer fertile ground for social networking. Across Uganda, family and tribal relationships create the foundational social networks of strong ties that perform vital functions in the culture. Family networks also influence three interrelated social networks in the Ugandan culture: the old boys' school networks, professional networks, and political networks.

Family Networks

Ugandan family networks consist of individual families that cluster into clans with a given tribe. Extended family ties also exist across tribes through marriages. Family ties develop and strengthen over generations through family, clan, or tribal group activities and ceremonies such as introductions, weddings, parties, burials, funeral rites, and recreational activities such as drinking, hunting, music, drama, and wrestling. During these activities, members are reminded of their family responsibilities, traditions, and values. Presiding elders recite their birth lineage so that young family members can know and understand the connectedness to their ancestry and the breadth of their extended family ties. Family ties can facilitate access to critical resources, enabling individuals to tap into resources such as land, traditional knowledge, and business ideas. Over the generations, some tribes, royal families, and families of chiefs have had access to more resources, such as land, than other Ugandan families and therefore have enjoyed more power, prestige, and privilege. As a result, Ugandan families often strive to establish ties with these resource-rich families through intermarriages and collaborations. Creating cross-family ties increases the reach of extended family ties, allows more resources to flow to them, and strengthens the social ties that families share with each other.

This family network can be a source of prestige as well as socioeconomic and political success. Family ties may identify potential spouses, arrange for marriages, make connections for job opportunities, offer welfare support in mobilizing food and fuel for poor or starving family members, and provide training in social roles and responsibilities. These family ties also offer knowledge and life skills to their children through informal education and enhance the emergence of interpersonal emotional ties that bind individuals to the family network. Extended family take care of sick relatives, orphans, and the poor by providing education, security, food, and medication. This extended family network is vital for dealing with socioeconomic challenges in Uganda, such as looking after human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) orphans and managing the postconflict trauma of resettlement. The family network also influences where relatives attend school, which professional career paths they pursue, and how political views are formed.

Old Boys' School Networks

The old boys' school networks are ties between former students (“old boys” or “old girls”) of the same school. Most family relatives often attend the same schools and belong to similar old boys' school networks. Thus, the social ties between old boys are also strengthened by common family connections. Lasting social relationships emerge as a result of the history of interactions embedded within school life, such as in class discussions, debates, cocurricular activities, games and sports competitions, field trips, and group projects. As a result, students develop lasting friendships, trust, goodwill, and commitment to each other. Old boys from the same school develop common interests, values, and beliefs as well as common leadership, social skills, and practical skills. Alumni stay connected informally as individuals or formally through old boys' school associations. Through these ties, they may share experiences and access numerous opportunities, such as access to job opportunities, creation of jobs through joint business ventures, connections for future marriage partners, fundraising activities for a common cause, promotion of their former institutions, provision of scholarships to other students, and professional career mentoring.

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