In Uganda, A Refugee Woman Is Paving The Way To A Dignified Life For Other Refugee Women
‘With just a little support, we have what it takes to help our own,’ says Chichi, who is enhancing refugee women’s political, socio-economic, and health status through her organisation: Kandakiaat Organsiation for Women Empowerment & Development.
By Chichi as told to Devyani Nighoskar
This narrative is a part of our ‘Everyday Women Leaders Series’ which highlights everyday women leaders, their stories, and their hopes. Read the other stories here.
‘I have been in Uganda for almost ten years now and continue to find purpose in my work with displaced people. I want to create a better world for myself and women beyond any labels. We need to reshape our perception of how we view ourselves. We have to step up as women and take the lead.
This is the story of my life — from my childhood in Sudan to my various studies in Zambia and Uganda. I have founded a refugee-led organisation — one of the handfuls of women-led RLOs in Uganda. We are a powerful minority.’
My need to empower myself and other women around me stems from my childhood.
I was born into a family of 10 in a village called Kadugli in the Nuba mountains of Sudan. My father was a farmer, and my mother was a homemaker. Growing up, my family was not very supportive of my education as they prioritised my brothers’ learning.
When my uncle tried to force me to get engaged at the age of 15, my parents supported my decision to study instead of getting married. While they did not believe in getting girls educated, they believed in supporting me. Back then, I dreamt of being a doctor, but since medical college was expensive, I enrolled in a business management degree in Khartoum. I also worked as a street vendor to support my education; however, it wasn’t enough, and I had to drop out.
That is when I started working in a church supporting women’s skill development. I helped out with craftwork, arranging exhibitions, and bookkeeping. Working with underprivileged women there sparked my passion and drive to continue working on women’s financial independence and empowerment.
Around that time, I stumbled upon an opportunity to apply for a diploma in women’s leadership development in Zambia. The course was challenging, especially since it was in English and my education in Sudan had been in Arabic. However, there are some causes that spark a connection despite language barriers. Patriarchy is a universal reality, and the fight against it continues beyond borders and across languages. I persevered and continued.
When I returned to Khartoum, I began working with the Sudanese episcopal church’s Department of Development in the Khartoum diocese. This was in 1998 when Sudan was facing civil upheaval and violence. Thousands of people were internally displaced, and women were among the most vulnerable groups at risk of sexual and gender-based violence, trafficking, and specific health needs. I assisted women in creating crafts out of palm leaves, providing them with sanitary products, connected them to markets, and led awareness campaigns on human trafficking. I had a tremendous sense of purpose after meeting women, hearing their tales, and frequently learning from them and their tenacity.
Soon after, I was awarded a scholarship to study social work and administration at a university in Uganda. This is where I met the man who would become my husband and the father of our four children. I completed my degree and moved back to Sudan in 2005; optimistic about the country’s prospects in light of the recent peace agreement reached between the North and the South.
Given my background, an international non-governmental organisation (INGO) employed me as a community development officer to help women gain knowledge of their rights and access to justice in a country just emerging from decades of war and civil instability. Soon after, however, violence broke out again, and I found myself working with female refugees, returnees, and internally displaced persons (IDPs), slowly coming to terms with the fact that I, too, might become one if the conflict continued to escalate.
The inability to implement public consultation, a provision for resolving the conflict in Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile States, led to a new civil war breaking out in the country in June 2011. After fleeing to neighboring South Sudan, another battle broke out there in 2013. Along with tens of thousands of other people, I had to leave South Sudan.
Even if the organisation I was working for at the time could afford to help me cross borders safely into Uganda, they couldn’t have been able to provide for my family the same privileges. I had to make a snap judgment: give up my one and only shot at survival or risk everything to get my four kids out of South Sudan. I am relieved that my instinct as
a mother was correct.
The three-day journey was grueling. So many were fleeing. I saw people dying in the streets and hungry children crying for food. The sound of gunshots was a constant, and so was the crushing anxiety about what awaited us next. Finally, on the third day, a bus took some of us with money across the border, and we proceeded to Kampala as urban refugees.
‘When She Knows, She Grows’: The Journey of Kandaakiat
Seeing the plight of refugee women and girls in the camps urged me to give them the tools they need to break free of oppression. As a result, I’ve been using what I’ve learned to help other refugee women improve their economic standing and self-sufficiency through activities like making and selling clothing and other handcrafts and hosting workshops on topics like sexual and reproductive health rights and violence against women.
In 2014, we expanded and formalised as a self-help organisation in response to the influx of fellow refugee women from Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and the Congo. We called ourselves ‘Kandaakiat for Women Empowerment & Development’.
Kandaakiat exists with the passion for empowering refugee women in Kampala city and the refugee camps in Uganda.
We hope to ensure that women everywhere never lose sight of their inherent strength and worth. Our ultimate goal is to see refugee women’s political, social, economic, and health conditions improve as they are liberated from injustice.
We do this through the following:
- Food security, livelihood, and economic development by facilitating short-term and long-term skill development and income-generating projects relating to tailoring, soap-making agricultural practices, and craft work and encouraging sustainable practices for climate change resilience.
- Through awareness sessions and workshops in refugee camps in Uganda and informal settlements, we advocate for financial literacy, women’s good health, and sexual and reproductive rights.
- Advocating officials and encouraging peer-learning models to improve equitable access to girls’ and boys’ primary and tertiary education.
- Carrying out continuous social research in thematic areas
After a lengthy bureaucratic process, we finally managed to register as a refugee-led organisation (RLO) in Uganda in 2018. Early backers of our initiatives were the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). Two of our earliest multi-year funding sources were the Women’s First International Foundation and the Refugee Resourcing Leadership Initiative (RRLI). Through membership in and attendance at NGO networks like RELON (Network of Refugee-led Organizations) and Cohere in Uganda, we were able to increase our capacity and raise our profile through exposure to events and seminars.
I believe that as RLOs, and especially as RLOs led by women, we can have a greater and better impact on the communities whom we work with because we can see things from their perspective and appreciate local contexts, cultural sensitivities, and pressing needs in a way outsiders can’t.
With just a little support, we have what it takes to help our own.
I remember one incident during COVID-19 when there were restrictions on the movements in a refugee camp that we were working with. There was an incident of sexual abuse toward a woman and her son, who had been locked up in the house. When the community members found out, a police complaint was filed, the culprit was arrested, and the case was closed. However, the woman and the child were traumatized. Kandakiaat immediately contacted them and started counseling them while continuing to advocate against SGBV.
So we are much better placed to implement solutions urgently. However, we need help to achieve visibility and ownership to carry out the programmes we want. We want the international community to:
- Give us ownership of projects right from the inception and design phases, so we can provide cultural context and community-driven solutions.
- Localise funding so that funds are directly accessible to us and do not trickle down through middle parties.
- Build the capacity of RLOs in proposal and grant writing, storytelling and outreach, and monitoring and evaluation.
- Advocate for mobilising more women-led groups: currently, in RELON, we only have five women-led RLOs among 900.
- Encourage quality and equitable opportunities for education for girls in refugee settings.
Just opening and funding schools is not enough. Most people with limited resources in the community will prioritise boys’ education over girls. Support needs to be provided in terms of other expenses such as books, uniforms, and community needs to be influenced to actually believe in girls’ education.”
