Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Uganda is a landlocked, Lake Victoria-fronting country of 40.2 million, bordered by deeply troubled neighbors. To the north lies newly independent South Sudan, by many measures Africa’s poorest state and plagued by incessant civil conflict. To the west lies the heavily contested eastern frontier of DRCongo, where government forces and insurgents fight seemingly endless battles. To the south lies Rwanda, scene of recurrent mass genocides. All this violence has not left Uganda untouched, a destination for persistent refugee flows. In addition, Uganda itself had to overcome the legacies of one of Africa’s most brutal dictators, Idi Amin, whose economic nationalization drive wreaked havoc on the country’s agricultural, mining, and trade sectors throughout most of the 1970s. Another calamity followed in the 1980s at the height of the late-twentieth-century HIV/AIDS pandemic: more than a million Ugandans succumbed, orphaning 1.2 million children. Responding massively in the aftermath, the government launched such an effective public-health campaign that the country became a global poster-child in the struggle against this disease."