Forum for Women in Democracy Uganda

The notion that empowered women transform societies is not just a tale it is the reality of some of the women who we have interfaced with. She felt like her story was over when her husband Henry Kasoro died in 2006 following a short illness, Midiath Kasoro is as mother of 5 children; 4 boys and 1 girl. Her husband was the breadwinner. This unfortunate incidence distressed, depressed and left her bitter. It was during that time that FOWODE started the vulnerable Women’s Empowerment Project in 2012 with support from Mcknight Foundation; Midiath’s life never remained the same. She and other members of Nyakaina FOWODE group and with 9 other women’s groups were trained in life skills and enterprise development. “I owe a huge debt of gratitude to FOWODE for training us in stress management, self-esteem and confidence building, assertiveness, effective communication, lobbying and advocacy, understanding patriarchy, gender based violence, Personal Presentation, ...

As part of the implementation of the Uganda Vision 2040 and in line with the Comprehensive National Development Planning Framework (CNDPF), government of Uganda under the guidance of National Planning Authority (NPA) is in its final leg of developing the 2 nd National Development Plan (NDPII) 2015-2020 to be presented to cabinet for adoption. The theme for this plan is “ Strengthening Uganda’s competiveness’s for sustainable wealth creation, employment and inclusive growth”. The main goal of the NDPII is to attain middle income status by 2020 for which four strategic objectives have been set namely; Increase Sustainable Production, Productivity   and Value Addition in   Key Growth Opportunities, Increase the Stock and Quality of Strategic Infrastructure to Accelerate   the Country’s Competitiveness, Enhance Human Capital Development and Strengthen Mechanisms for Quality, Effectiveness and Efficient Service Delivery. The NDPI sighted gender inequality as on...

As part of her capacity development initiatives, Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE) with support from UNWOMEN Uganda organized a Gender and Economic Policy (GEP) training for 20 Civil Society Organisations representatives and Local government officials.   The topics that were covered were, Gender and sexuality, Gender responsive budgeting, unpaid care work, Feminist Economics, social justice among others. The objective of the training was to create a pool of gender budgeting experts that would in turn pass on the information to other stakeholders at the grassroots levels. It came out strongly from the start that if people of an economy are unhealthy, the economy will be affected and the reverse is true. Therefore,  using a gender lens in formulating government policies is essential because of the various gender roles that they play in a community. For many participants, the term Feminist Economics was incomprehensible but at the end of the session th...