Caritas Uganda: tackling
needs, pushing for good policies
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| Thanks to a Caritas project in Uganda a South Sudanese refugee is helped to cultivate akra |
Caritas Uganda was founded in 1970 and is the overall
coordinating body for the socio-economic development of the Uganda Episcopal
Conference. With over a million refugees, Uganda is the country that last year
took in more people fleeing conflict and poverty than any other.
By Linda Bordoni
In 2018 Uganda took in more refugees than any other country
in the world. Large numbers of those stranded are children in need of
everything to survive and develop.
Other challenges faced by refugees include agricultural
productivity, information dissemination and distribution of goods. Caritas
Uganda is on the frontlines with short and long-term programmes to help them
integrate and become autonomous.
Caritas Uganda Program Coordinator, Hellen
Chanikare spoke to Linda Bordoni about Caritas’ work with refugees,
about other pressing challenges it faces, and about the increasing need to
recognize the role of women in decision-making roles.
Refugees
Hellen Chanikare explained the vast majority of refugees in
the country have fled from violence in South Sudan in the Democratic Republic
of Congo.
She said that the main need of the South Sudanese refugees
is food security.
After having tackled an emergency phase, she said, “right
now we are trying to provide them with crops that can give them food security
for at least six months and even a year”.
Chanikare said that thanks to the Ugandan government policy
according to which the refugees must be integrated into Ugandan society, they
are given land to farm, and this, she said, helps Caritas as well in its effort
to sustain the refugees.
5 strategic objectives
Chanikare explained that Caritas Uganda focuses on five
strategic objectives.
She listed them as food security; response to humanitarian
needs, climate change, disease management and the promotion of good governance
through advocacy for policy change, transparency and accountability.
She said the increasing effects of climate change are such
that Caritas has decided to take the “Climate Change” programme out of the
mainstream and tackle it as a “stand-alone” objective.
“Looking at the disease burden,” she said, “we have so many
diseases that are impairing our interventions with development: for example the
HIV epidemic, we have Ebola, we have the nodding disease in the northern part
of the country”.
Promotion of good governance
That’s why objective number five is so important, Chanikare
explained, because only by pushing for good policies on climate change and on
food security can true development ensues.
“We need good policies for the farmers to produce”, she
said, and regarding climate change “we need good policies to protect the
environment and ecosystems”.
Caritas family
Caritas is confederation with a world-wide reach. Chanikare
said she feels supported and sustained by the rest of the Caritas family and
explained she participates in two different Forums that bring many members
together to join forces.
These, she said, are the Caritas African Forum and the
Women’s Forum: “I see us speaking with a concerted voice” and thanks to these
Fora, she said, were are able to raise important issues, debate them, and bring
them to the attention of the General Assembly when it met at the end of May.
The Women’s Forum
Chanikare said the Women’s Forum is particularly important
to her.
“It is very important. We are working in a structure that is
mainly male-dominated, so having the Women’s Forum is a way of getting the
voices of women to express what we want in this male-dominated scenario,” she
said.
She also expressed her belief that it is really important
for women to be represented at the highest levels of the governance body of
Caritas Internationalis and of the Church in general: “We need that women’s
voice, it could be religious women, it could be lay women, but we need their
voice up there”.
“We have differences in thinking, in feeling, differences in
the body and that needs to be taken up to that level,” she said.
Chanikare said she was very satisfied that thanks to that
Forum, the women of the Caritas family were able to make some very good
recommendations that were presented at the General Assembly.
She said she is optimistic that change is underway – as she
waits to see how those recommendations are translated into policy.
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