Women’s Empowerment is Key
Women represent the majority of ultra-poor subsistence farmers in Uganda. To eradicate ultra poverty in Uganda, we have to create space for and design plans with women at the forefront. Villages with women in positions of leadership become our most successful partners and consistently show the greatest improvements in household income.
Creating a safe space for women to dialogue and collectively identify their concerns, priorities, and goals is the foundation of every successful partnership. Facilitating the opportunity for a women’s voices to be heard within the community opens minds and changes the traditional dynamic.
Since women often serve as the primary caregiver in their homes, we create time and space by addressing household constraints and top of mind concerns such as improved access to water, agriculture, nutrition, and door-step health visits. Addressing these core issues creates availability for women to participate in village trainings, leadership opportunities, and offers many women a moment to finally catch their breath.
We design our programs to focus on providing seeds for crops traditionally identified as “women’s crops”, addressing gaps such as availability of farming tools, and women’s initiatives that put power primarily into the hands of women. The results of these programs consistently benefit the entire household. Intentional design encourages women to step into decision-making and leadership roles for the very first time.
Watch Women Be Empowered
See how Raising The Village is empowering women to become leaders in their communities.
Helping Men and Women Work Together
The tent pole of our program is our Healthy Household training series. This series covers topics such as finances, savings, goal setting, household dynamics, and decision making at the household level. The activities and training focus on getting both adults in the home to shift their perspective of women, and to see women as an equal teammate working together to achieve shared goals for the family.
Women by the Numbers
Raising The Village projects help create nearly 32 new leadership positions in every village, seeing a 300% increase in opportunities for community members to become civic leaders. This has a significant impact on creating new leadership opportunities for women.
From our 2016 partner cohort of 26 villages, community leadership positions were represented by 149 men (62%) versus 93 women (38%). Following the implementation of our programs, in 2021 the same partner villages were represented by 1445 men (68%), 452 women (21%) and 213 youth (10%) holding positions of leadership.
