UGANDA'S OWN WOMEN-LED INITIATIVE

As narrated by Constance Okollet, Co-founder, Osukuru United Women’s Network, with Leon Franz

When Osukuru, a town in eastern Uganda, suffered devastating floods in 2007, Constance Okollet was quick to make the connection with climate change.

As a health worker, she visited families from home to home. Constance saw how the floods triggered food and income insecurity for local people. She recognized this as part of a pattern of increasing climate risks, which the community had to confront.

Most families in Osukuru earn income from selling the surplus produce they grow. However, droughts and floods are becoming more frequent and intense, threatening this means of livelihood.

People’s responses to climate shocks have distinct gender dimensions. After floods wash out the fields and destroy crops, as in 2007, men tend to leave the community to seek jobs in the cities. They leave their families behind and sometimes never return, exposing the women and children to further financial hardship and insecurity.

Meanwhile, climate-related disasters catalyze discriminatory practices. Income insecurity leads to early child marriage, and girls dropping out of school. Girls also walk long distances to fetch water and firewood. In this vulnerable context, they are often forced to engage in transactional sex work. Gender-based violence is a stain on people’s lives: Osukuru is located in Tororo District, a trading center in East Africa. The town has a strong sex trade that is associated with HIV/AIDS and many other sexually transmitted diseases. Without secure opportunities for income, many women and girls are forced to turn to the sex trade and are subject to violence and illness. Constance banded together with 12 other health workers to tackle these compounding problems. Together, they formed the Osukuru United Women's Network (OWN).

Uganda Women’s Network Grows Community Resilience

OWN started a package of activities to empower women economically, socially, and psychologically, and to mitigate flood and drought risks. It initiated savings and loan associations, and supported women to develop productive, climate-resilient kitchen gardens. From small beginnings, OWN has grown to become a force of more than 2,000 women helping each other. It all started, Constance says, when her observations about the changing climate were validated at an Oxfam meeting. That’s where she heard about climate change trends and impacts in Uganda, and how effective it is to plant appropriate tree species and crops to help people adapt. She and her 12 health worker friends, each from a different village, fanned out to organize women in their respective villages, starting savings and seed-fund activities to increase each woman’s self-sufficiency. The key was mindset change: encouraging village women to increase their confidence in autonomous livelihood activities.

The saving associations and kitchen gardens have enabled women to leave behind dangerous sex work for safer occupations. The initiatives have helped women access funds and generate income for daily priorities, such as their children’s school fees.

Activities by OWN include:

• Farming, processing, and selling climate-resilient produce suited to the local area. Members produce diverse foodstuffs – from tomatoes to fish – both to eat at home and to sell. Cassava, the area’s staple crop that is also a well-known climate-resistant crop, is cultivated collectively by members to bolster their food security and income. Processing is also involved, such as making cassava flour.

• Tree regulation and cultivation to ensure greater tree cover. Members cultivate tree seedlings and sell them for profit. Tree stewardship is also a community focus – if someone cuts a tree down, the local by-laws now require them to replant at least five more trees.

• Reuse and recycling of organic matter. Instead of following the convention of cutting bush grass to thatch their roofs, members now collect rice husk that would otherwise be discarded. They repurpose the husk into roof thatch – promoting the ethos of “reduce, reuse, recycle”.

• Wetland conservation. Members had historically grown food in the local wetlands and drained the water off into ditches. However, members now recognize that the wetlands are an important “sponge”. The wetlands help regulate water flows in times of floods and droughts, making them a vital natural asset in a changing climate. Members have stopped draining the wetlands for agriculture and they discourage others from doing this. They are working to provide local communities with alternative sources of income and alternative farming locations, to conserve the wetlands.

In the beginning, most men in the community were highly resistant to OWN. Some even forbade their wives to participate. But the women persisted, and over time, men became actively supportive. The key, says Constance, was the women’s economic empowerment: this has reduced stress in households, reduced friction and domestic violence: “When a woman has some money in her pocket, she will not wait for her husband’s support. The husband also fears to beat their wife because she has a choice,” Constance explains.

The movement went from strength to strength. Now at more than 2,000 members, OWN has more than 40 sub-groups that work and organize independently. They focus mainly on spreading climate change knowledge and adaptation techniques through women’s group meetings, and they still provide savings and loan functions. They have made it obligatory for every member to plant at least half an acre of cassava, as well as to maintain a kitchen garden. In this way, they have increased food and income security substantially in their communities.

Outreach initiatives by the members have gone a long way: the 13 founders approached local government departments, agricultural extension agencies, and non-governmental organizations to seek training, capacity building, and material inputs for climate-smart agriculture and climate-resilient value chains. In response, government departments at district, county, and national levels have provided training, as well as quick-maturing maize varieties that can withstand uncertain weather and climate conditions. Most recently, OWN managed to acquire funding from the local agricultural office to build a cassava processing plant.

How Challenges Are Addressed

OWN generates solutions, as well as facilitates and manages adaptation initiatives over the long term, without being dependent on project-based financier funding. With relatively few financier-funded projects, members still manage to develop and sustain solutions on their own. That said, it is difficult to grow the organization to the next level due to the lack of funding. Building long-lasting solutions often requires capital, which is difficult for OWN to acquire.

A case in point is the cassava processing factory: OWN raised money for the factory, contributing around one-fifth of the costs from its members, while the government’s agricultural development fund paid the rest. However, the local administration, which built the plant and put the machinery in place, failed to connect the factory to the power grid, pleading a lack of funds despite their initial promises. Therefore, the factory is in place with all the necessary machinery, but it is not functional due to the missing power. This has been the case for over a year now. It remains one of the women’s greatest challenges. Although technically the issue is straightforward to fix, the lack of funding and capital hinders progress.

OWN has now partnered with Engineers Without Borders to develop a design for an energy supply that relies on solar and biogas, which can be produced out of the waste of cassava processing. Still, the upfront costs are too high for OWN to progress this themselves, while financiers are difficult to attract.

Challenges also include widening the leadership of the organization: there is, and always has been, the need to strengthen the necessary capacities in the community. Much responsibility rests on Constance’s shoulders as the face and voice of the organization. The structure and future success of the organization could eventually be threatened when she is ready to retire. Moreover, many young people, especially educated ones, leave the sub-county to search for better jobs in urban centers. Exploring new forms of income-generating activities is a key strategy to retain more human capital within OWN, which simultaneously helps to establish OWN’s future leadership.