October 16, 2020 – Earlier this month, the Whitaker Peace & Development Initiative (WPDI) began training 50 local, vulnerable women from Gulu, the main city in the Acholi Sub-Region, in business and entrepreneurship. Held over a three-month period, the weekly trainings aim to provide the cohort of women – which include single mothers, the disabled, widows, and women with chronic medical issues – with tangible skills that will help them both support themselves and their families as well as foster sustainable development in their communities. The training is the first phase of our Business Bootcamp program, and ultimately, we will support them as they create five cooperative businesses in groups of 10 that they will design and manage based on the skills they learn with us in the coming months.
In the Acholi Sub-Region – an area of Northern Uganda that was enveloped in an internal conflict for decades until the mid-2000s – many communities are still struggling to recover from the devastating fight between the Government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal insurgent group. A central observation of ours is that vulnerable communities are often trapped in cycles of fragility whereby conflict and poverty feed upon each other, defying traditional approaches that tend to isolate peacebuilding initiatives and efforts at economic development. To the contrary, our strategy in these areas is to holistically combine the two, targeting in particular marginalized groups whose exclusion is an often unseen source of fragility for the community as a whole. This is the gist of the “No one left behind” principle at the core of the Sustainable Development Goals. Providing economic opportunities to vulnerable people, especially women, is therefore key to helping these communities get on a path towards lasting resiliency. Our efforts to help the cohort of 50 women become entrepreneurs seek to improve their livelihoods and benefit, in turn, their communities through additional employment opportunities for local youths and others.
In these efforts, sustainability is our chief concern. This is one of the reasons why the 50 women have been recruited in groups of ten individuals, stemming from the same areas and who have some experience working together. As sustainability will also depend upon the knowledge and skills of our aspiring entrepreneurs, it is necessary to ensure that they are well prepared for their future responsibility at the helm of a business. To this effect, WPDI will train them for three hours per week over the next three months. During that time, they will learn how to identify sustainable entrepreneurial opportunities, manage finances, and develop their own business plans, among other things. The women themselves found the trainings to be very rewarding, with one of them, Sunday, telling us that “I know that the skills in entrepreneurship and business will help me build my small business. I will do my best to learn, be successful, and help other women gain opportunities.”
As the 50 local women continue their training with us over the next three months, we look forward to helping them become full-fledge entrepreneurs who can promote positive transformation in their communities. In so doing, they will join the thousands of people that WPDI has trained in Northern Uganda, all working to promote peace and sustainable development there.