By Pelucy Ntambirweki
Harriet Namayanja was 17 years old when she was orphaned and left to care for her eight brothers and sisters. Before her death, Namayanja’s mother had taken out a micro loan from the Uganda Women’s Effort to Save Orphans (UWESO). With UWESO’s help, Namayanja inherited the loan after her mother’s death. With both the mat-making skills she learned from her mother and the UWESO loan, Namayanja paid back the first loan and has since taken several others. She now supports her eight younger siblings, pays their school fees, and grows much of their own food.
Bernadette Nakayima, a 70-year-old widow, lost all of her 11 children to AIDS and was left to care for her 35 orphaned grandchildren. Like Harriet Namayanja, she relied on UWESO to help her care for her grandchildren. With UWESO loans and training, she is able to send her grandchildren to school and generate income through a variety of small enterprises. She has also built a permanent house and started a savings account.
According to 1999 UNAIDS estimates, there are about 1 million orphaned children in Uganda, largely as a result of the AIDS epidemic. This epidemic has led to a marked increase in adolescent-headed households and has placed a heavy burden on elderly and surviving family members. Some orphans, also infected with HIV, place the added burden of expensive medical care on their caregivers. UWESO works to address these growing needs by providing resources and opportunities to communities and families that support children orphaned by AIDS. With the support of donors such as USAID and UNICEF, some 10,000 UWESO volunteers work with communities in 35 districts of Uganda. UWESO’s credit and savings organization has members from 5,000 households, reaching approximately 35,000 orphans.
UWESO believes that to ensure the sustainable care and future of children orphaned by AIDS, it is important to extend support not only to orphans directly but also to the communities that care for them. By helping eradicate poverty at the household level, UWESO helps ensure the continued development of communities and households caring for Uganda’s AIDS orphans. It accomplishes this through a variety of programs, including advocacy, micro credit, vocational training, education, and relief.
UWESO promotes participatory, family, and community-based programs to ease the burden on caregivers of the large numbers of children orphaned by AIDS in Uganda. Its mission is "to improve the quality of life of needy orphans by empowering the local communities to meet the social, moral, and economic needs of the orphans in a sustainable manner." Its core strategies focus on building the capacity of caregivers, increasing their abilities and opportunities for generating resources and becoming actively involved in the development of the children for whom they provide care.
UWESO programs include:
-
UWESO Savings and Credit Scheme (USCS), which is used as an entry point for health-related interventions. Guardians are trained in business management, record keeping, the importance of saving, and effective use of small loans. Through this program, they can acquire credit and build a self-managed savings account. The meetings are also used to disseminate health education messages to guardians.
-
Education for orphans on such topics as HIV/AIDS control and prevention, primary health care, water and sanitation, sexuality, and growing up.
-
National and international advocacy for meeting the needs of orphaned children.
-
Masulita Children’s Village, which boards and cares for 50 children and adolescents orphaned by AIDS. Orphans in this home participate in peer education activities that use music, dance, and drama to disseminate information about health, nutrition, children’s rights, and prevention of HIV infection.
-
Formal and informal vocational training. Depending on their education level, sponsored, orphaned adolescents may learn a vocation in a formal, structured government institution in their district. Others are placed with a successful artisan in the community for 9-12 months to learn practical skills that lead to self-reliance. These skills include business management, carpentry, welding, masonry, bricklaying, radio repair, bicycle repair, and nursery school teaching. UWESO then helps orphans acquire the materials necessary to practice their learned professions.
Program Results
A 1999 evaluation of UWESO’s initiative to support the communities of AIDS orphans confirmed improvements in nutrition, access to medical treatment, education of children, and living and housing conditions of participants in the USCS. All participants are aware of how to prevent HIV and to care for HIV-infected relatives, in addition to having improved knowledge of water and sanitation, nutrition, and primary health care — topics that are discussed during USCS meetings.
Many orphaned adolescents have successfully completed the vocational training program and are employed in their home communities, generating income to help look after themselves and other members of their family.
Meeting Challenges
Because of low demand for certain vocations, some orphans have been forced to move from their home communities to find employment in the trade in which they have received training. Other drawbacks to the vocational training program are the lack of resources in the government training centers as well as a tendency for training to be more theoretical than practical. Attracting female orphans to traditionally male-dominated trades has been a further challenge.
Reaching orphaned youth is easier when they are in the care of responsible guardians, relatives, or foster parents. It is a challenge when youth are on the street, without a stable home. UWESO has worked with sister organizations to remove these children from the streets by equipping them with the skills needed to find employment and settle in a community. Some have been repatriated to their place of birth, and probation officers have been encouraged to return orphans to their homes and communities.
The biggest challenge faced by UWESO, however, is the ever-growing number of children orphaned by AIDS.
Despite these obstacles, UWESO has been successful in its scope of work as a result of :
-
intensive capacity building of clients;
-
active participation in and ownership of the program by orphans and their caregivers;
-
government support, including good working relationships with district officials, and formulation of supportive policies for UWESO programs;
-
focus on women-headed households in which many orphaned children are living;
-
easily accessible micro loans; and
-
promotion of and information about why savings are important.
Lessons Learned
UWESO continues to evolve as it responds to the communities it serves. Since its inception, the organization has learned the following secrets of a successful program:
-
Institutionalizing children should be only a short-term intervention. Rather, orphans should be assisted within the communities where they live to safeguard their identity and culture, and protect their property.
-
Involvement of guardians and adolescent orphans in all stages of the program is paramount for long-term sustainability and program ownership.
-
The focus should be on eradicating poverty at the household level.
-
Capacity building and application of newly acquired skills and knowledge are key to orphans’ becoming self-supporting.
-
Well-motivated staff are crucial to the programs; they should work well with families caring for orphans.
-
Program evaluation should be a continuous process.
-
Resources, time, money, equipment, and trained personnel are essential.
Contact Information
Pelucy Ntambirweki, Executive Director
UWESO
P.O. Box 8419
Kampala
Uganda
Tel: (256-41) 532394/5
Fax: (256-41) 532396
Email: uweso@imul.com
