Ministerial Visit to Uganda and South Africa

Foreign Minister Valgerdur Sverrisdottir recently returned from a trip to Uganda and South Africa. In Uganda, the Icelandic International Development Agency (ICEIDA) runs a diverse programme, stretching from adult education programmes to feeding young schoolchildren through the World Food Program. "I was very happy to see the benefits of this program with my own eyes. The aim is to fund every day as many school lunches in both Uganda and Malawi as there are Icelandic schoolchildren, or about 45 thousand," Mrs. Sverrisdottir says. "And during the trip to Pader, in North Uganda, representatives of the WFP informed us that as they buy the food locally they have managed to raise the number of school lunches in Uganda to 63 thousand."

During her trip to Africa Mrs. Sverrisdottir also saw the serious side of war-torn Uganda. She visited a home in Pader for children suffering from the effects of having been kidnapped and held for years by the Lord's Resistance Army. She met with President Yoweni Museveni and discussed further collaboration between the two countries in the area of geothermal energy. Iceland is in the forefront of sustainable use of renewable energy use with close to 100% of electricity in the country being from renewable sources.