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Understanding the gender implications of government policy is important for effective implementation. This article examines the gender implications of the COVID-19 government response in a liberalised economy. It sought to examine the gendered effects of the Uganda government's COVID-19 response. Specifically, it interrogated the gendered experiences of males of females of the COVID-19 lockdown, how gender shaped these experiences and how gender can be mainstreamed in the COVID-19 response. Following guidance from the World Health Organisation, Uganda's COVID-19 response included lockdown, massive testing of people in quarantine and at borders, contact tracing, a national community survey and promulgation of laws to penalise non-compliance. The key method of data collection was documents review of both grey and published literature. The key findings showed that the neoliberal economic system in which Uganda's COVID-19 response was implemented cannot effectively serve the interests of all. Rather, gender, compounded with economic, social and regional inequalities converged to produce negative experiences for women and other marginalised groups in relation to health, education, justice and livelihoods. The article concludes by recommending attention to gender and context when designing crisis response strategies. Specifically, to recommends safety nets to enable the vulnerable survive crises like COVID-19.

For the last three decades, Uganda has been one of the fastest growing economies in Africa. Globally praised as an 'African success story' and heavily backed by international financial institutions, development agencies and bilateral donors, the country has become an exemplar of economic and political reform for those who espouse a neoliberal model of development. The neoliberal policies and the resulting restructuring of the country have been accompanied by narratives of progress, prosperity, and modernisation and justified in the name of development. But this self-celebratory narrative, which is critiqued by many in Uganda, masks the disruptive social impact of these reforms and silences the complex and persistent crises resulting from neoliberal transformations. Bringing together a range of leading scholars on the country, this collection represents a timely contribution to the debate around the 'New Uganda', one which confronts the often sanitized and largely depoliticized accounts of the Museveni government and its proponents. Harnessing a wealth of empirical materials, the contributors offer a critical, multi-disciplinary analysis of the unprecedented political, socio-economic, cultural and ecological transformations brought about by neoliberal capitalist restructuring since the 1980s. The result is the most comprehensive collective study to date of a neoliberal market society in contemporary Africa, offering crucial insights for other countries in the global South