Hello, welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service. We're coming to

live from London. I'm Paul Henley. In East Africa, women's rights groups have called for urgent action to

protect women being abused by male partners following the death of the

Ugandan Olympic marathon runner Rebecca Cheptagae, the 33-year-old who was a mother of two young girls,

died four days after allegedly having been doused in petrol and set alight by her ex-boyfriend where she lived and trained in Kenya.

Her murder comes two years after the murders of two Kenyan women runners also at the hands

of their partners.

A UN report reveals a hugely disproportionate number of killings of women by men in African countries.

In a national survey in Kenya in 2022,

over a third of women said they had experience of physical violence.

I've been speaking to Uganda's minister for sport, Peter Ogwang, who gave me his reaction

to Rebecca Chept chapter gay's death.

First of all we really want to begin by sending our condolences to the family of Rebecca

for the timely death.

I was in Paris with Rebecca and the team for all the days. They were in Paris for Olympic Games.

I returned with them back home during that very send-off for them to get back to their respective homes,

Rebecca got my number and she talked to me that she had a family problem.

As a minister of sports, I had a plan of going to visit their families because I had

personally seen the performance of my daughters, which of representing my country, was not good.

So I had to come up with a plan to go and visit their family so that I understand what

pressures they are facing.

For a book of course, it's unfortunate that she has died when I have not met that plan of mine,

...