Challenges
Women’s Untapped Potential
Gender equality is not only one of the key Millennium Development Goals, it is an urgent necessity in Uganda. Goal 3 declares, “Promote gender equality and empower women.”
At NAPE, we know that Uganda can overcome our serious environmental challenges only if we achieve the equal participation by women in decision-making at all levels of government and society.
Their increased role will provide new perspectives and observations, based on women’s intimate knowledge of the home and natural environment around them. In areas from growing food crops and child-rearing to the weather and human rights, women have years of experience in judging what the consequences of environmental changes can have on their family and community. Moreover, women provide much of the labor in their families, and their actions can either help or hinder environmental progress.
Entrenched Gender Roles
This makes it doubly unfortunate when entrenched gender roles interfere with women becoming full participants. Without women involved, Uganda cannot effectively confront the effects of climate change, degradation of natural resources, food security, dangerous chemicals and a host of other threats to our sustainability.
In too much of Ugandan society, especially in poor rural areas (which need all the help they can get) women are consigned to passive roles by traditional customs, further depriving communities of the vast potential of women to contribute their knowledge and energies to such vital struggles. Women are further disadvantaged in many rural communities by both legal and informal bars to their ownership of land, which denies them both resources and stature in the community.
Gender Mainstreaming Unlocks Potential
To that end, NAPE has included mainstreaming gender at the core of all of our programs. We began with ourselves, assessing the lack of women in management positions and our organisation’s lack of knowledge about gender issues. We established a gender desk at NAPE to manage and address gender concerns, developed a gender policy, and provided staff training to identify and correct inequalities in community action. In turn, our staff conducts community awareness training to reduce the gender gap in communities throughout Uganda. For example, NAPE has made special efforts in the Lake Albert oil region to inform and mobilize rural women to assert the rights of their families and communities and oppose illegal oil industry and government actions.
To read documents about women’s untapped potential, click here for Library.
To read more about NAPE’s action agenda, click here.
