Kosiya Awarded 100th Water Tank
Less than four years ago Kosiya Kigwezegyezi was an elderly man struggling with subsistence farming on an unproductive piece of land in Uganda to support seven children, three of whose mother had died. Today he has a thriving three-acre smallholding and - most importantly - has just been given a 5,000-litre concrete water tank to secure his extended family’s farming future.
It’s the 100th water tank to be funded by an Italian church, La Chiesa Valdese. The congregation heard about the Uganda project through a charity trustee and decided to donate money for the tanks. To celebrate the occasion Guilia Antonini from the Italian embassy in Kampala made the 250 km journey north to the remote Kasagama sub county in Lyantonde district, south west of Kampala for the official ‘opening.’
The charity responsible for this and other projects is Trust for Africa’s Orphans (TAO). They work in partnership with Uganda Women’s Effort to Save Orphans (UWESO).
TAO has provided local agricultural extension workers to raise the standard of sustainable farming in local communities throughout Uganda. This UK charity was set up by an expatriate Ugandan, Joy Mugisha and they understands the basic African spirit of community and family land ownership. All the projects are designed to enable orphans and those who care for them to stay in their communities.
For Mr Kigwezegyezi the turning point was meeting his extension worker, Geoffrey Kayondo. With his advice, coupled with hard work and the knowledge gained from attending all the sustainable farming courses offered by the field training staff, at the age of 70 he now has a thriving plantation of bananas, vegetables, and healthy goats for meat and milk and organic fertilizer.
These supply not only food for the family but income. Further hard work led to him moving out of his grass-thatched mud and wattle hut into a solid brick house. The corrugated iron roof will channel rainwater into the water tank.
The name of the cluster of beneficiaries to which Mr Kigwezegyezi belongs is Bwavu Mpologoma. “Bwavu means poverty,” he says, “while Mpologoma means a lion. It is an expression of how terrible poverty is, it is a deadly lion that could swallow one up, therefore the need to fight it with all one’s might.”
ENDS
"Addicted to aid?" (BBC Panorama, 24th November 2008)
Those who watched the Panorama programme on aid to Uganda will be understandably upset that some aid is misplaced and does not go to the poorest people who really need it. But not all.
Trust for Africa’s Orphans, like other reputable NGOs, carries out strict monitoring and evaluation of all its programmes. We provide motorcycles and bicycles, not 4 x 4s, for staff working on our projects. And we are committed to three key principles:
- We work with African communities, understanding their heritage, values and customs, and do not seek to impose European or Western styles of charitable assistance where this might cause long term cultural conflicts.
- We work only on projects which allow orphans, and the families who care for them, to remain in their local environs. We understand the basic African spirit of community and family land ownership and do not seek to displace children or villages.
- While our projects are run as separate and distinct programmes with clearly defined objectives and timescales, allowing us to measure the positive impact we are able to make, they are also designed to be sustainable once we have left. And yes we follow that up also.
Now the civil war in Uganda’s Northern region has ended we are helping people like 17-year-old Esther. When her parents died her uncles evicted her, her siblings and other members of her extended family from the family home and land. She is the head of the household. So Esther had neither shelter nor the ability to grow food. With our local partners, Uganda’s Facilitation for Peace and Development (FAPAD) and Uganda Women’s Effort to Save Orphans (UWESO), and thanks to support from the Baring and Ellerman Foundations who have just returned from an inspection visit to the region, we are training local people as paralegals to help cases like Esther’s.
Now her land and property rights have been restored Esther can start growing food not only for her family but also, helped by our expert advice on sustainable agriculture, to produce enough to sell and provide income.
Iain Knapman, chairman TAO
Joy Mugisha, UK coordinator TAO
Big lottery cash for Uganda’s displaced families (1st March 2008)
Thousands of people who fled from their homes because of conflict in northern Uganda will benefit from a Big Lottery award to the Trust for Africa’s Orphans. The money will be used to enable them to access legal help in securing their former homes and land rights and train them in sustainable farming.
Now the Lords Resistance Army’s activities in the north of Uganda have ceased, it is safe for families to return from the displaced people camps. Many of them lived in those camps for 20 years and their children were born there
.“We found that many of those returning – especially widows whose husbands had died either in the conflict or from AIDS – had lost their homes and land to squatters while they were away”, says Joy Mugisha, TAO’s Programme Coordinator. “They are so poor they need help to get them back on their feet.”
TAO will help dispossessed people and others secure tenure and then train them in sustainable smallholding agriculture including the use of oxen for cultivation, beekeeping, planting trees for reforestation, raising crops for food and cash, and livestock. This intervention will not only provide them with food but give them income from the sale of surplus produce. Over and above direct beneficiaries the project will reach another 45,000 living in the area through awareness campaigns.
The project will be implemented in collaboration with UWESO (Uganda Women’s Effort to Save Orphans) and FIDA (Uganda Women’s Lawyers Association) with whom the Trust has previously successfully worked on sustainable farming projects in Uganda.
“We understand the basic African spirit of community and family land ownership,” says Joy Mugisha. “Our projects are designed to enable orphans, and those who care for them, to stay in their communities.”
TAO is currently recruiting staff for the 3-year project, due to start in May 2008.
“The Big Lottery money will really make a difference to these people’s lives,” says Joy Mugisha, “because if people don’t have land security then they cannot begin to start farming it to feed themselves and earn money to help with their children’s education.”
Uganda Peace Talks (1st December 2007)
The BBC reported on 1st November 2007 a visit by the chief negotiator of the Ugandan rebel group, the Lord's Resistance Army, to the capital, Kampala, to meet with President Yoweri Museveni as a symbol of the group's commitment to a peace process. It is hoped this first official visit to the city will lead to the end of two decades of rebellion in the north of Uganda in which hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians have been badly affected.
TAO welcomes the anticipated end to hostilities in Uganda in order that it may extend the reach of future relief projects to the north of the country where living conditions, incomes and health and nutrition standards are significantly lower than in other parts of the country.
(Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/7072701.stm)