Rural Women Making a Difference in Their Communities (Part 1 of 3)

My community tourism work takes me through many areas in rural Uganda. I get opportunity to meet and interact with the ordinary people. The majority perceive their villages and homesteads as poor and backward and themselves as without opportunity. The unfortunate trend is for able people moving to towns and cities in search of economic opportunities, leaving behind mostly women and the elderly.

Due to lack of knowledge and exposure, they do not see the potential hidden within their surrounding environment, indigenous knowledge and cultures. All is not lost, though amongst the community there are some who have not given up and are not waiting for government or donors to improve their circumstances. In a bid to survive, they have become innovative.

This is demonstrated in the case of three rural women in Mbarara district in western Uganda who have used their knowledge, skills and natural gifts to improve themselves, their families and made a difference in their communities. The women demonstrate how an empowered woman can be an agent of positive change in her home and community.

COBATI identifies such deserving women and trains them to include tourism in their initiatives. The homesteads are now part of our “Home-stay” program, giving visitors opportunity to share the extraordinary experience of these rural women achievers.

Through this blog, I am sharing the initiatives of these women with Ode magazine readers. Hopefully the exposure might result in some other rural people replicating their work to make a difference to other struggling rural women in the developing world.

Jane Kahima – Home Based Domiciliary

Jane is a rural housewife and a retired midwife. After years of being woken up in the night by desperate husbands from her village and neighboring areas seeking assistance for their wives undergoing labor, to help deliver babies from her house, she realized she could make a living out of her midwifery skills, by providing the service to her community but lack of space was her problem.

An opportunity came when the family moved to a new house. Jane with support from her family turned the old one into a domiciliary and got licensed to operate home based domiciliary at her homestead. The set up is very homely. After delivery mothers are kept for observation for a night. In the domiciliary there are two rooms with beds with baby cots, the delivery room is amazingly clean with a normal delivery bed like one in hospitals, there is a big plastic covered bucket for instruments, gowns, gloves, gum boots, protective head cover etc. After every delivery, Jane takes the instruments to a government referral hospital 30 km away for sterilization.

Waste materials from the delivery are disposed off in a special place in her banana plantation, a very deep hole with a cemented floor covered with lid under a roof top. The hole is kept clean; Jane regularly pours ash from special herbs to purify it. Complicated cases are referred to the district main hospital.

I first visited Jane in 2000, when I went back 3 years later; there was a lot of improvement. With approval from district health authority, Jane added Child Immunization and HIV/AIDS counseling and testing to her services after attending courses at the district. Jane is now offering HIV positive women opportunity to deliver their babies with dignity, as they are comfortable with Jane. HIV positive women usually face acute prejudice and discrimination in many hospitals. Acquiring a gas cooker has enabled Jane to sterilize the delivery instruments at home. The Kahima’s homestead is now included in COBATI’s Home-Stay program. Community tourism enables Jane’s family to provide educative rural experiences to visitors and added homestead income as her villages is not far from Uganda’s main tourist circuit.