Women empowerment promotes peaceful co-existence for all

Uganda is home to over 1.5 million refugees, mostly from the neighbouring countries of South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Somalia Djibouti , among others. A big number of these refugees are women. Some of these refugees are living in settlements, while as others are within the urban centres including the city of Kampala.  Regardless, both settlement and urban refugees face similar challenges.

A case in point is Pagirinya Refugee Settlement in Adjumani District, in northern Uganda. Adjumani, according to statistics from The United High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), has the highest number of refugees; 209,315 (14 percent) of the total number of refugees in the settlements in Uganda.

In January this year, a news bulletin on one of the popular TV stations in Uganda featured a young girl who belongs to a football club- Pagirinya Young Ladies Football Club. At the sound of the club’s name, one would automatically imagine that the girls have always had  it smooth at their game with all the support from community members. But that is not the case.

Malia Peace, a player on the team, shared in the TV interview that her parents restricted her from playing football before. Much as she is a brilliant student and had always taken her studies seriously, her parents always thought she didn’t have to play a ‘boys’ game’.

With encouragement from her coaches, she pursued her dream and still maintained her score at school, which forced her mother to support her dream. Malia and other players on the team are only a handful of refugee girls in the settlement and elsewhere who have been discouraged from chasing their dreams. For peace, prosperity, and inclusiveness to be achieved, the issues of gender equality, through women empowerment ought to be addressed.

However, empowering women to bring about gender equity among refugee girls and women and host communities does not seem like a walk in the park, knowing the inferiority complexities that accompany their status. As a popular philosopher noted, one may not control all the events that happen to him or her in life but can decide not to be reduced by them. As such, several non-government organisations, government agencies and development partners have gone ahead to implement programmes to empower refugees, especially women and girls.

For instance, since October 2021, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has had an agreement with SOLTILO Football Club (SBS), a Uganda Premiere League Club,  to implement the sports for protection/development in selected refugee settlements including Kampala. The programme is one way of fostering connections and peacefully coexisting to benefit refugees and their hosts. Following the agreement, JICA has conducted several football events in Pagirinya Refugee Settlement of Adjumani as well as conducted a tournament dubbed the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) cup in August 2022 that comprised of refugee girls and host community and school teams from central, east and western Uganda.

Interestingly, there are various ways of empowering girls and women as they are naturally a creative lot regardless of their status in society. This can be through creating awareness  and sensitisation on important issues impacting their lives, supporting their dreams and education, providing mentorship, and encouraging them to take on roles that have for long been viewed as boy’s or men’s, among others.

Mr Inoue Yoichi, Chief Representative, JICA Uganda Office