VOICE OF HUMANITY UGANDA
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COMMUNITY NEEDS ASSESSMENT
VOICE conducts regular needs assessment baseline surveys among slum communities where it works. Resolutions from Group meetings are compiled to analyse initiatives which communities want to pursue. VOICE complied the following pressing needs which communities need:
Child Education and Protection
In times of war, children suffer the most because their minds cannot make appropriate choices of actions and their bodies are less resistant to harsh conditions. Children are dying from diseases caused by severe malnutrition because their families do not have enough food to eat. Flooding contain feacal wastes from disused pit latrines and contaminate drinking water in the open wells. Children drink water from these sources and get infected with diseases which kill them. Children also play in the open waters and get infected with bilharzia, which also kill them. Child mortality is high because diseases are transmitted quickly due to congested slum settlements. VOICE constructed pit latrines and urinary facilities at Gulu Prison Primary School, and rehabilitated a pit latrine for girls at Kasubi Army Primary School to encourage more girls to enroll in schooling. These were funded by The Netherlands Albert Schweitzer Foundation in 2017.
Children from war-affected families hardly afford school fees, so they do not go to school at all. VOICE believes that by children not going to school, the culture of violence, which is the root cause of wars in the region, will persist into the future. Child education would restore self-confidence to build sustainable peace, reduce social exclusion and increase employment opportunities for youths from war-affected families who are target reserves for combat duties during conflict.
VOICE hopes to raise funds to; pay children in schools, build schooling infrastructure, conduct capacity-building for teachers in gender-sensitive child-centred aspects of Ugandan school curriculum, and feed children in schools to reduce school drop-outs due to hunger since most children are malnourished from their own homes. Most children who dropped out of school are rapidly joining street lifestyle, learning how to rob and kill people at night for survival purposes. VOICE hopes to raise funds to rehabilitate children already living in streets through psychosocial counselling, and vocational skills training so that they become nonviolent and productive adults who can support their families economically.
Healthcare, drinking water and sanitation
Diseases and mortality, are very prevalent among communities. Refugee communities have low knowledge on prevention and immunization to themselves and their children. Malaria, HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis B, Tuberculosis, diahorea, dysentry, and malnutrition are widespread. Communities need reduction in the high mortality rate using preventive rather than expensive curative interventions which they cannot afford. Drinking water is mainly from open water wells. Boreholes are too few. Piped water supply has very limited coverage and expensive to pay for the monthly bills. Sanitary pit latrines are in wide scale use because public sewerage systems do not reach slums. However, pit latrines quickly fill up due to high population density in slum settlements. Lack of land to construct new pit latrines force residents to keep using filled up over-flowing pit latrines whose wastes keep splashing during flooding, into homes and contaminate the open water wells from which communities draw their drinking water.
Emergency Humanitarian needs
Food, clothes, where to settle, access to drinking water, medicine especially to vaccinate their children or treat wounds, and psychosocial trauma is affecting refugees from South Sudan. Local war-affected Ugandan communities require long term, rather than short-term humanitarian needs.
Shelter
Affected families live in very squalid, unhealthy and congested slum settlements. Monthly house rents are hardly affordable because the families experience extreme poverty due to limited sources of viable income. The houses are poorly constructed makeshift of grass thatched huts prone to fire outbreaks, burglary and flooding. VOICE successfully sensitised host landowners to offer land to help war-affected communities build low-cost shelter by themselves. Each house that was built comprised two rooms to house about 12 occupants, and on average, cost 1980 US Dollars. The worst vulnerable beneficiaries had first priority.
Gender equality, protection of women and girls against violence, discrimination and social exclusion
War in the region left more widows than widowers, with hundreds of thousands of orphans to look after. During war, young girls were sexually abused, had pregnancies with their tormentors and were left with those siblings to care for. Widows who lost their spouses at the time of war and resisted traditional cultural practice of ‘wife inheritance’, were banished from their village land in the post-conflict resettlement process and came to live in towns. Most war-affected women headed families lack employment and entrepreneurial skills. Due to harsh urban economy, most they survive on prostitution, petty businesses, alcoholism, drug trade, theft and hire-killings. Local communities resent them. Rich men sexually exploit them for little gain, and most times, infect them with Sexually Transmitted Infections because their social and economic status does not favour them to make choices. The women, and their families have low social esteem because communities hold negative prejudice against them. Physical violence, torture and deprivation of tenancy are common injustices against these women. Most of their children are street children because they cannot afford to pay fees, and because their families are associated with street children, communities hold them responsible for the violence, robbery, hire-killings, drug addiction and alcoholic lifestyle of street children. VOICE believes that attitude of local communities towards these vulnerable groups must change so that they embrace love for one another. Low socio-economic status of the women and girls need to be raised so that they achieve equal status in society. Proactive steps need to be taken for these women and girls to build their self-confidence and esteem, so that they begin to participate in key decision making processes within their localities, as a starting point for social inclusion. Girls need to attend school so that they will be empowered with knowledge and build economically viable families, so that they and their families gain respect. Girls need gain employment beyond sexual exploitation by men as a means of survival. VOICE intends to empower women with employable skills, entrepreneurial skills and expose them to successful social groups outside Gulu Municipality. Communities need to participate in building sustainable roots for social inclusion among children in schools, slum settlements, VOICE working groups, youth groups, and so on.
Poverty eradication through sustainable family livelihoods
War-affected communities face harsh economic hardships because urban economy is largely monetary. Poverty is very widespread among war-affected communities because they are illiterate and lack employment opportunities. They carry out very petty businesses, with little capital and entrepreneurial skills. They need to gain employable skills outside formal education. They need training in entrepreneurship so that they can scale up their petty businesses to sustain their families. Skills in hair-dressing, liquid soap-making, textile knitting, ornament making, carpentry, metal welding which have local market, would empower them economically. They need training on land and property rights for women under Ugandan laws, and international conventions so that they are not deprived of their land and property on the grounds of their sex or culture. At appropriate time, it would be quite supportive to capitalize their small scale businesses to enable their family economies grow.
Protection of environment against negative impact of climate change
Negative impact of climate change is a major root cause to extreme poverty among agriculture-dependent communities in northern Uganda. War-affected communities build congested huts in environmentally sensitive wetlands, swamps and flood-prone areas because land value is low there. They depend on fossil firewood and charcoal which cause respiratory track diseases associated with in-house pollution. Houses are largely lit by paraffin and wax candle. Poor drainage cause floods which spread water-borne diseases. War-affected communities are destroying sensitive urban ecosystem. This will cause negative impact on climate. Trees are cut down for fuel, wetland are reclaimed for settlements, fossil fuel emit lots of air-polluting smoke. Communities need spatial planning of their settlements that conserve their urban environment. VOICE supported tree planting to demarcate land boundary for purposes of mitigating land disputes against economically weak families and promoting environmental sustainability, during implementation of the low-cost housing project. Community awareness needs to be raised considerably to clearly link their own activities to negative impact of climate change such as; flooding, drought, diseases, rising costs of energy, and so on. VOICE promote conservation of wildlife for cultural benefits, research and touristic value, and environmental sustainability.
GAPS
VOICE identified the following challenges that inhibit needs of communities to be met:
1. Insufficient funding to carry out activities
VOICE and its 12 working groups are yet small though growing. With little funds, nothing much can be done. VOICE needs to partner with grant-making organisations to donate resources to implement activities that address needs of its beneficiaries. Empowerment of beneficiaries through entrepreneurship will enable VOICE beneficiaries make in-kind donation to implement activities that benefit the entire community. The number of beneficiaries keep growing, but resources are very scarce and irregular in coming. VOICE needs resources to meet its overhead costs and staff emoluments, but cannot fully do so.
2 Capacity building
Community leaders need knowledge and skills in participatory activity implementation, risk management, fraud control, entrepreneurship skills, advocacy for sustainable energy and environment, and gender equality in community development work, peace building and social networking. VOICE has a vision that the working groups be self-sustaining and autonomous socio-economic pull-agents for their communities in future when they get empowered enough.
VOICE needs training for its staff and Board so that they are more effective and efficient in project delivery. VOICE is has few staff, yet more staff cannot be recruited due to lack of funds. VOICE require overheads such as laptops and desktop computers to enable staff accomplish their work diligently, transport like motorcycle and vehicle to reduce costs of hiring transport for field activities, internet to help communication, office cabinets for record keeping, chairs, photocopying machine, scanner and printer machines, money-safe to reduce risks of burglary because VOICE lacks resources to hire private security guards, and money to offset monthly office rent, utility bills and staff salaries. VOICE needs capacity to reach out to a wider community of participants for its activities.
3. Too many people wanting to participate in VOICE activities.
VOICE likes innovative ways of doing the same things, which has quickly attracted membership to the organization, and won exemplary commendations from local authorities yet VOICE lacks capacity to disseminate and spread such ideas to a wider community. Innovative ways of carrying out activities is attracting a larger number of membership than VOICE can afford. This imply that VOICE can only serve a small fraction of its members at a time, which might lead to negative perception on effectiveness and efficiency of the organization.