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...

Forum for women in Democracy has embarked on profiling women leaders that are vying for leadership positions in 2016. FOWODE acknowledges that there is need to profile women leaders that are championing women’s issues for a stronger voice on issues concerning women in decision-making processes. We strongly believe that movement building and profiling women leaders is critical to building a strong voice for women and to holding the state and non-state actors accountable to critical women’s issues. The Uganda Women’s movement despite tremendous efforts to keep women’s issues alive on the National agenda has faced a number of challenges in ensuring the adoption of gender sensitive policy formulation and gender sensitive initiatives. This could be attributed to the insufficient articulation of critical gender and women’s issues in policy debates and dialogues, un-coordinated voices on women’s issues and lack of political will on the part of government to fu...

We the members of the women`s movement and civil society organizations working with women are concerned about the worrying and emerging cases of internet violence against women. We are aware that sex videos and nude pictures have dominated social media and have made headlines on national news papers and tabloids which not only in itself constitutes violence against women, however the consumption of such material facilitates further acts of violence against women. It is unfortunate that these acts of exposure have often targeted women excluding the men about who little is heard. This trend is at least in part attributable to the development of a   new   problem of internet related violence against women, this relates to leaked videos of intimate sexual activity, stalking, and violence against women   on the internet . These have continued to endanger the lives of the victims who do not only experience harsh judgment from the general public but also suffer loss...

Forum for Women in Democracy represented by Executive director Patricia Munabi joined the rest of Uganda’s civil society to pass on the 2015 New Year’s message. She through our community radio station Speak FM, passed on the message to the people of Northern Uganda. The message recapped the milestones, major fault-lines of 2014, aspirations and commitments for 2015. In 2014, momentum and consensus on the need for Free and Fair Elections was gathered, this year saw “one of the most formidable citizens’ efforts towards building the momentum to advocate for free and fair elections in Uganda. Milestones Civil society did not relent in the campaign against theft of public funds.   The Black Monday Movement sustained the campaign against theft of public resources. The overall objective of the Black Monday Movement is to mobilize citizens to mount a sustained assault against the injustice of corruption. The Black Monday Movement’s flagship newsletter has gone f...

The Bunyoro mock parliament was held at Ikoba boy’s primary school, Bwijanga Sub County on 22 nd January 2015. This session reached a total number of 100 people and among whom 44 were female and 56 were male. The purpose of mock parliaments aimed at building the capacity of young women, youth and People With Disabilities, PSA’s to effectively engage in legislative debates and give platform for the community to interrogate public accountability and service delivery issues. As 2016 draws close, Forum for Women in Democracy found it imperative to discuss and share views on what people think will happen next if elections are not held in 2016. Basing on the fact that before elections are held the country must have Electoral Laws that are to govern the process like the Electoral Act, Parliamentary Act, and presidential act that are not in place and yet time is too short since these laws are meant to be formulated by parliament to debate and pass them. Beside this t...