Equal Opportunities For Women & Children in Uganda (EOWC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to ending discrimination, improving lives and ending poverty. Our work is in Uganda within Eastern Africa. We put women and children at the center of development efforts because we know that we cannot overcome poverty and all other social economic challenges until all people have equal rights and opportunities.
We are also focused on popular education to politicize communities; simultaneously address practical and strategic needs for women with a focus on the marginalized rural women, women with disabilities and indigenous women (Batwa) in West Uganda.
Our entry point is women’s collectives through village loans and savings associations (VLSA’s), this is an approach we feel is truly transformational for rural African communities whose poverty and resources, poor eco systems limit the sustainable impact of a range of initiatives focused on either practical or strategic needs.
Our main goal is the prevention of GBV and advancing women’s holistic safety and well-being which brings in economic justice. We are promoting economic justice and climate action as key drivers of GBV. Our two approaches include engaging at strategic level and practical needs level. Strategic level includes critical thinking sessions using popular education material for these women to understand barriers and generate solutions.
It is followed by facilitation of power mapping exercises for these groups to generate effective advocacy and activism strategies, which they implement themselves in engaging with power holders at the local government level, traditional leaders, religious leaders and opinion leaders.
Recently, the organization joined Uganda Women’s Network to link with a national advocacy platform and take micro experiences to in come the macro level policy changes. Simultaneously, our other strategies focused on practical needs aimed to increase individuals and household incomes, in so doing, we elevate the status of these marginalized groups and accords them collective power and knowledge and information, which reinforces the ability of the strategic, needs engagements to succeed.
Since these are communities dominated by subsistence agriculture, we begin this line of work with skills building in agribusiness (beyond just good agricultural practices). Financial literacy and the cooperative model: By this, the women are able to then increase their own household income as well as own assets that can move them from basic survival (buying food and medicine) to poverty transformation e.g. cattle and land vs chicken and ducks.
Their VLSA’s at village level are then merged into a cooperative that are providing support to grow into fully fledged cooperatives to further grow their agribusiness and have stronger collective economic power that will reinforce the strategic needs, advocacy mentioned above.
We came to this two pronged approach through learning, we started off with advocacy with GBV prevention through our MEL assessments, realized the deep rooted barriers that included women’s subordinate economic position and a multitude of barriers for economic advancement but were reinforcing GBV.
EOWC is currently working in the south west of Uganda (Kabale, Kisoro and Kasese Districts). The program areas are deep in the rural areas of the above mentioned districts. However, due to insecurity faced in Kasese district last year, programing in that district has been suspended.
