Before I joined the VSLA group, I used to struggle a lot to take care of my children. When I heard about the group, I decided to join and quickly started to save. I would save between Ugx2,000 to Ugx3,0000 every week. But with earning from my harvest from the kitchen garden, I now save between Ugx7,000 to Ugx10,000 each week. The kitchen garden has also reduced my overall expenditure on purchase of food, many of our meals at home are made from the eggplant. Eggplant is nutritious, so I believe my family’s nutrition has been improved.”

–Annah Omara

 

In Northern Uganda, women are the “administrators” of their households. They determine household affairs ranging from food procurement and meal planning as well as making sure there is enough water in the home for that day’s needs.  They are solely responsible for making sure all children have bathed and eaten, and that all daily chores are accomplished. Women are pivotal to their family’s survival in Uganda and are the pillars in every household. Even with this great responsibility, many of them are excluded and discriminated against when it comes to significant household and/or community level decision making. This reduces them to a mere unpaid-workforce who have no power over decisions on matters that directly affect them and their families.

 

Annah Omara is perfect example! She resides in Loro Sub-county, Oyam District in Northern Uganda. In early 2019, she heard that women in her area were working together to save and invest in small business opportunities. This inspired her and made her eager to know more. She eventually joined a women’s group called “Vision Youth Group”. Vision Youth Group is a women’s Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) group. In this group, all members make weekly monetary contributions to a central pool. This pool keeps growing over time and members can borrow from it at very low interest rates for any aspirations and innovative ideas they have to launch a small business. Members can borrow money and then pay back the loan over time so others can borrow in the future as well. In addition to their yearly savings members are entitled to a distribution of the interest that was gained from the monies borrowed that year. The additional amount distributed to each individual from the interest is calculated based on how much that individual contributed to the common pool.

WNSP supports such groups by providing initial and ongoing training on group management, finance management, general finance literacy and investment management. They also receive training on advanced agricultural and horticulture practices such as kitchen gardening, value addition and marketing of agricultural products.  WNSP also provides training focussed on income generating activities and market dynamics. 

Annah attended all the trainings but was particularly interested in improved agricultural practices, kitchen gardening and value addition. She learned how to plant, transplant and manage a kitchen garden, as well as, how to bring additional value to her agricultural produce. With the skills acquired, Annah was destined to improve the livelihood of her family. Annah quickly implemented a kitchen garden in her backyard.  Her first crop was eggplant. Her choice was based on the fact that eggplant have a readily available market in her village. Her first harvest was particularly stunning to her and she noted that the yield was higher than the other gardens even though the kitchen garden was much smaller. Her harvest far exceeded any harvest she had witnessed using the conventional practices. Rather than sell her eggplant as is, she decided to dry the egg plants, ending up with over 100Kgs of dried egg plants just from her first harvest. With her first batch of dried eggplant she  earned approximately Ugx500,000 ($140)  using the kitchen garden technology with one vegetable and one harvest.

 

 

 

Annah and children currently sleep in a single grass thatched house, but with the opportunity to expand her kitchen garden and make more money, she is hopeful that she will be able to construct a small three roomed permanent house in the next two to three years. 

WNSP believes that this form of personal empowerment directly influences women by revitalizing a sense of hope, ambition and aspiration where there was once despondency. Annah went from a sense of poverty to having hope and realistic plan to construct a permanent house for her family. Her sense of self-esteem and worth has been significantly strengthened enabling her to stand up and advocate for her family. A number of studies indicate that increased socio-economic empowerment reduces discrimination against women and girls because strong social systems, educational or financial empowerment offers higher status in the household and society.

WNSP prides in the quote, “If a woman is educated, enlightened, and empowered socio-economically and morally, she can draw the family forward socially, economically and morally. If a family progresses this way, a district progresses, a state progresses and finally the country progresses.”