Pandemic Forces a Pivot for Kampala, Uganda Nonprofit
At Set Her Free, fighting against COVID-19 and for the rights of vulnerable women and girls go hand in hand.
For the last 11 years, Robinah Muganzi and Robin Nestler have been fighting to help vulnerable women and girls escape poverty and exploitation in Kampala, Uganda with their organization Set Her Free (SHF). In the last two years, however, they’ve had to pivot, balancing that battle with the one against a global pandemic.
Ordinarily, SHF provides vocational training and formal education to vulnerable girls from Kampala, helping them get the skills they need to become self-sufficient. However, in March 2020, COVID-19 first came to Uganda, and the country went into a severe lockdown and has been in and out of lockdowns ever since then. Uganda’s lockdowns are often more severe than what people might be used to in the U.S., with much more heavily restricted movement and suspended religious services, for example. The severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in Uganda is exacerbated by the gross worldwide inequities in vaccine distribution — at this time, only 18.4% of Uganda’s population is fully vaccinated.
The staff at SHF has seen firsthand the traumatic chain of events the pandemic has caused for vulnerable women and girls. As employment and free movement have suffered as a result of the pandemic, households have suffered, and women and girls have suffered. SHF’s biggest fear as the pandemic took hold was girls permanently dropping out of school, as they had to shut down their schooling and skills training programs. They also didn’t have the capacity to house all the girls on-site, so many had to return to permanently residing in exploitative or abusive domestic situations for the foreseeable future and couldn’t attend school or skills trainings. SHF had to do their best to release everybody to safe places where they could keep tabs on the girls’ well-being, but it was difficult to check in with the girls and make sure everyone was safe amid lockdown restrictions.
As a result, SHF has pivoted their programming during the pandemic to respond to the need to keep girls safe in these unique circumstances, as well as help the wider community in Kampala, many of whom are newly vulnerable. Their most successful new program has been Safe Spaces. In response to the problem of losing girls to economic and domestic exploitation, they started these peer support groups for their girls; there are now five throughout different communities in Kampala. These spaces are led by peer mentors where girls can bond and look out for each other, creating a safe space for both them and others in the community. Robin says they have proved invaluable in terms of capacity-building, as these decentralized Safe Spaces have provided a way for the girls to continue checking in with each other when that’s gotten harder for SHF staff due to lockdown restrictions. The Safe Spaces have also created a wider net to catch women and girls who are new to Kampala from the countryside and in need of the kind of help SHF can provide.
Additionally, SHF has created initiatives to help the Kampala community navigate the economic impact of COVID-19. They’re prioritizing economically vulnerable families and individuals with their programs, such as direct cash transfers and livestock and food distribution. As with everything they do, Robin notes that SHF involves the girls in these programs as much as possible and uses them as teaching opportunities, such as about nutrition and program operation. SHF has started moving their operations out to the countryside away from urban Kampala during the pandemic, both for COVID safety and as a means of generally increasing capacity. With this new land, they’ve been able to start farming and use the produce they grow both to eat and to distribute to the community.
SHF’s partnership with GlobeMed at The George Washington University (GW) has been important to their efforts. There have been pandemic-related issues GlobeMed at GW and SHF have had to work together to overcome, primarily related to the absence of in-person GROW internships. Without GlobeMed students coming to Kampala, it’s been harder for Robin and Robinah to express what it’s really like on the ground and articulate the context of what they need from GlobeMed students. However, they’ve found that as always, GlobeMed students are eager to help with whatever is needed and can navigate whatever difficulties arise. For example, two 2021 GROW students, Sadhana Matheswaran and Sarah Lawrence, have continued handling SHF’s social media presence into the school year, which Robin says took a huge issue off her plate. Whenever unexpected needs arise — for example, creating COVID safety pamphlets to distribute to the community or fundraising extra money for a lockdown emergency — SHF has also been able to count on GlobeMed students to come through and help.
Going forward, SHF will be keeping many of their new and expanded programs, such as Safe Spaces. Robin predicts completely moving out of Kampala to the countryside in the next few years as they look for practical means to expand their capacity, keeping new programs, and opening their arms to new girls, especially girls who have been especially hit hard by the pandemic, while still maintaining much of their pre-existing programming. However, she stresses that the long-term effects of the pandemic on vulnerable women and girls should not be underestimated. SHF has seen an increase in teen pregnancies, including in girls as young as 13; girls trapped in abusive domestic situations; and girls dropping out of school as they must take on more of the burden of providing for their families, often in ways that lead to exploitation. The consequences of these problems are long-term and intergenerational and can’t be fixed overnight, and SHF is already thinking about how the pandemic will affect the need for their programming 5–10 years in the future.
