The Change the Story project has been empowering mothers in Uganda

Street Child are pleased to report on their Changing the Story (CTS) project in North and North-western Uganda. CTS has successfully provided 2,286 mothers with access to educational resources and knowledge around life skills and health, positively impacting their children’s access to education. Over the last 20 years, due to the Lord’s resistance Army (LRA) conflict, areas in Northern Uganda have struggled to maintain stability and grow economically. Infrastructure has been destroyed and a high number of people have been displaced internally. This created a generation of youth and children who had limited access to school and experienced economic hardship and challenges. This was of course exacerbated by the impacts of COVID-19, disproportionately impacting marginalized groups such as women and girls. Despite the government of Uganda introducing adult literacy classes, women were being left behind. The CTS project sought to tackle this inequality.

CTS provided mothers between the ages of 19-29, with access to educational resources and knowledge around life skills and health. This empowered them to have the confidence to express their opinions within their communities and home settings. Street Child were able to run workshops such as community theater events. These were designed to amplify female involvement and promoted community dialogue sessions for different social groups and radio dialogue forums on gender norms and female social inclusion. Through these key areas of support, we were able to help reduce the inequality faced by young mothers in their communities.

To ensure the sustainability of this project, Street Child had to look further than just providing the skills to the mothers – we also needed to provide them with a safe space and support to make sure that they continued to be able to achieve their greatest potential. Thanks to funding, 40 Mother Care Centres were either refurbished or strengthened to provide the women with a safe, secure space to act a centre point for these groups for years to come. We also worked with 1,544 male caregivers who were taken through specific life skills training which helped to change their attitude towards women’s involvement in household and community decisions. Working with these male caregivers was crucial to the success of the project and ensured that no mother was restricted from achieving their best because of their gender.

COVID-19 had a devastating impact on these communities and haltered activities which meant we had to change the way we were operating to ensure that the project could continue to support these young mothers and male caregivers. By working together with the British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the project team and local Community Based Trainers we were able to be flexible and quickly adapt our activities to ensure that these mothers could still be reached, whilst ensuring theirs, and the communities, safety. Due to restrictions on movement and gatherings, we empowered the mothers to be their own trainers and conducted peer-to-peer learning sessions. With the support from the local districts, we were able to empower a lead mother to conduct training sessions to new mother groups. This not only enhanced the lead mother’s knowledge, whilst ensuring the new mothers received training, but it also created a new sustainable method of learning after the project finished. This successfully utilized and empowered the mothers to be their own source of knowledge and continue to learn.

A key outcome for this project was to increase the number of children going to school. Through the training sessions with the mothers and male caregivers, we emphasized the importance of education and helped to change their mindset on this. In the first few years of the project, we saw a significant increase in the number of children of the mothers who attended the training, going to school. COVID related school closures, changed this. Due to the length of schools being closed, some children will have been out of school for 22 months by the time schools reopen in January. Now more than ever, it was important to continue emphasising the importance of school and help mothers and fathers be able to send their children back to school once they reopen. Overwhelmingly, 94% of fathers said that when schools do reopen, they will send their children to school. These statistics clearly demonstrate the positive impact CTS has had on these communities.