Women were not only abducted to ferry looted foodstuffs by the LRA rebels, they were abducted as fighters, yet they were not given proper attention. That is one of the reasons why she formed GWED-G, arguably the largest grassroots human rights organisation in northern Uganda, which has assisted over 1,700, writes Tobbia Jolly Owiny.
While the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency climaxed in 2004 in northern Uganda, an ignored crisis, sexual gender-based violence against women and children, quickly appeared as a problem to be dealt with.
Pamela Angwech, then serving as an aid worker with the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP), would not only witness but experience the extremity of the insurgency.
‘We went to difficult places where we carried dead bodies, put them on tarpaulins on top of food, and brought them back to the hospital. One day, in early 2004, I saw a baby squeezed in a queue for food rations. That changed my perspective,’ she says.
Angwech asked the mother to untie the child she had strapped to her back. She advised the mother to walk to the front of the line for a special ration.
‘When she untied her baby, we all realised that the baby’s neck was stiff. She was dead from suffocation,’ she says.
Then in her late 20s, Angwech, now a Gender and Women specialist, resigned from her job with WFP and launched Gulu Women’s Economic Development and Globalisation (GWED-G), a local initiative to rehabilitate female victims of conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence.
‘We started the movement under a mango tree in Palaro Sub-county, Gulu District. It was about women’s rights activism. You will notice that women’s bodies became the battlefield. The war was associated with many sexual offences and abuses. I started mobilising women to understand their rights and shrug off the negative mindset they had at the time,’ she explains.
To Angwech, respect for the integrity of women within the post-conflict region remains of significant value. Women were not only abducted to ferry looted foodstuffs by the LRA rebels. They were abducted as fighters, yet they were not given proper attention.
Although there were a heap of hurdles on her way, a determined Angwech was not deterred in peddling an agenda aimed at protecting and promoting the rights and safety of women during the conflict.
‘Serving with the WFP offered me an added advantage since it had already exposed me to numerous risks, including riding through ambushes. Back then, the Acholi society was patriarchal. No one believed we could move the conversation on women’s advocacy until I mobilised some to join the Juba peace talks in 2006,’ she explains.
They were seen as stubborn women; women who wanted to involve themselves in a male-dominated platform, speaking about peace-building, yet every morning, people were running away from bullets.
‘We were denouncing things such as sexual and gender-based violence, and gang rape. We preached post-conflict needs for women’s recovery, peace-building, peace negotiations, forgiveness, reconciliation, and the fact that during conflicts, women play multiple roles as caregivers by supporting those who are maimed,’ she recalls.
Picking the pieces
Twenty years down the road, Angwech’s efforts have paid off. GWED-G, arguably the largest grassroots human rights organisation in northern Uganda, has assisted over 1,700 war victims through physical rehabilitation projects, giving them prostheses, among other forms of support.
The organisation is runs 603 women groups across Kitgum, Gulu, Amuru and Lamwo districts, with each group comprising an average of 40 members.
‘We have continued to mobilise and sensitise not only female survivors of war and their children (sired in captivity), but also grassroots women into human rights defenders’ groups, through which they can report and address GBV and their economic rights,’ the gender activist says.
Angwech takes pride in her ability to build the capacity of thousands of women who now work as mediators, peace brokers, and breadwinners, including taking up leadership roles at the grassroots.
According to her, women can now talk about their rights, education, access to land rights, ownership of property, and productive resources.
‘Right now, we are a consolidation of 102 women-led organisations across the greater north sub-region. We also work with role-model men, who are advocates of gender equality, to help the community accept war victims, avoid stigmatising them, and equip them with farm implements and other livelihood options,’ the activist says.
To Angwech, the bigger vision is to realise an engendered victim-centred transitional justice process.
‘We want to see women become part of every decision-making platform, asking for social accountability, and attending district council meetings,’ she says.
The hurdles
While insufficient funding, especially during and in the post-Covid-19 era, has limited her capacity to do more, Angwech says political interference remains a hurdle due to the shrinking space in which civil society can operate.
‘The most difficult moments occur when I cannot provide for the people in need of my support. For women, it is even more difficult because you cannot seek to redress the needs of a woman without focusing on her children’s needs. As long as you leave their children behind, you are not helping,’ she explains.
While the war lasted about 20 years, the activist believes that it could take more than those years for the region to fully recover. Angwech’s dilemma is compounded by a failure by society to absorb children born of war and collaborate in protecting the rights of their mothers.
‘Some of the women lost their land because people thought they were dead. We have witnessed situations where funerals were held for some victims, and when they returned, they showed them their ‘graves’ and told them they no longer had land,’ she says.
There are more war victims in urban areas than in the local communities because of discrimination, stigma, and a lack of access to land. Children of war are considered aliens who were fathered by killers. These children do not know their fathers’ clans, making it difficult for their mothers’ clans to accept them.
‘For us to say that the war is over, war victims must be able to co-exist in the community at all levels. Those who return at a customary level need land for reintegration,’ Angwech adds.
Sluggish recovery
While civil society has, over the decades, done a lot to complement the government’s efforts to rehabilitate the region, Angwech says much more needs to be done.
‘The gun is silent, but that does not justify that it is over in terms of development. The shift that we have right now is on peace, but due to the lack of certain components within the development programming, there is more conflict in family settings. The root cause of sexual and gender-based violence is poverty. We are not channelling enough resources to address a particular issue at a time,’ she says.
While agriculture, livelihood support, food security, and business development are the biggest issues of focus in the region, Angwech argues that the limited resources in the hands of the population are swallowed by the high costs of accessing social services like health and education.
While the government needs to focus on social reconstruction to enable reconciliation, psychological healing, acceptance, and unity in the communities, it needs to intensify its efforts to specifically address biting poverty at the household level.
In 2003, progressively succeeded by the Northern Uganda Social Action Fund (NUSAF) II and III, the government came up with the USD100 million NUSAF program.
Because the need to eradicate poverty in the North could not be quickly accomplished under NUSAF1, the second NUSAF2, a five-year project, was launched, only to be succeeded by NUSAF3 (a USD130 million Specific Investment Loan (SIL) from the World Bank (IDA) in 2017.
The Acholi sub-region suffered the greatest impact of the LRA war, being the epicentre of LRA activities and abductions, with over 90 percent of the population at the time displaced to Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs) camps.
Before introducing NUSAF2 in 2009, the government hurriedly slotted in the Peace, Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP), a USD600 million program, in October 2007 to deliberately rebuild and empower communities, revitalise the economy of the north, and foster reconciliation and peace building.
In the case of the PRDP, a total of Shs337.47 billion (31percent), Shs327.5 billion (30 percent), and Shs426.73 billion was budgeted seeking to overturn income poverty levels, and illiteracy, including water and sanitation challenges that the region grappled with.
While the PRDP4 programme came to an end, its sister programme, Development Initiative for Northern Uganda (DINU), was rolled out in 2019 by the government to help consolidate stability in the north, reduce poverty, and strengthen the foundations for sustainable and inclusive socio-economic development.
However, despite all these interventions, a much worrying level of poverty continues to hinder the northern part of the country. For example, last year, the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) ranked the Acholi sub-region as the poorest in Northern Uganda at 67.5 percent, 2.5 percent higher than the Karamoja sub-region, in its national poverty ranking indices.
‘It is difficult to quantify the beneficiaries of the NUSAF 1-3, PRDP 1-4, ALREP, and NURI programs. There has been less impact. So right now, what we need to focus on is our own land and agriculture, especially perennial and cash crops,’ Angwech says.
She calls on the government to consolidate its focus on economic justice and economic recovery, address issues of poverty, and increase household income. She adds that this intentionally designed approach should not leave behind women, who form the largest force in the agricultural sector.