By Kefa Senoga
The stories are many.  But here’s one:

• A Ugandan woman lost her husband a couple of years ago. The man was the family’s sole breadwinner. With the head of the family gone, the children turned to their mother  to provide basic necessities. And she had none. Overburdened by the new responsibility, the woman suffered a mental toll with thoughts of suicide. Fortunately, that did not happen.

Michael Eceru, a social worker, believes that the woman is still alive because she shared the challenges she was going through and was able to get timely, mental health intervention. 

“After the death of her husband, this woman lost hope,” said Eceru, who graduated from Uganda Christian University in 2014 with a Bachelor of Procurement and Logistics Management. “She did not even have land where to grow food crops for her family.”

He recalls that the woman shared her struggles with him, and that from the discussions they had, they would often come up with solutions. 

The result is that the woman was able to save money and eventually bought land from which she now grows food crops to feed her family. In addition, she also earns some little income from farming that she uses to support her children’s education.

This testimony is among those that Eceru and his other colleagues at the Destiny Community Development Initiative (DECODI), a non-profit organization,  share with women whose lives are in distress. Among the actions DECODI considers vital is restoring hope in the mind of anyone facing hardship, in order to turn their tales of sorrow into tales of joy. At DECODI, Eceru serves as the organization’s Programs Director.

He and his colleagues have made it their preoccupation to empower and transform the lives of widows, single mothers and other women groups in rural parts of northeastern Uganda. Part of the training involves empowering the women to participate in commercial farming. 

And because illiteracy is a major hindrance to success in business, DECODI also empowers the women through training in adult literacy. Named Functional Adult Literacy, the program is one of DECODI’s current projects, where the beneficiary women are enrolled in an adult learning program, which is an opportunity for them to have a formal education.

One of the objectives of the program is for the beneficiaries to acquire numeracy skills, so that they can be able to keep records of accounts for their small income-generating activities. But the benefits of acquiring literacy have now spread beyond the limits that DECODI had earlier imagined. 

“Now, when mothers take their children to hospital and the health practitioners write prescriptions for medicines, they are able to follow,” Eceru said. “Misinterpretation and misunderstanding of the prescription can cause over or under-dose.” 

Though DECODI’s initiatives were initially intended to only benefit women, the organization has broadened its reach to involve men in their activities. Eceru observes that they also recognize the importance of creating a protective environment for their beneficiaries. As such, he says, they engage other stakeholders, such as family members of the beneficiaries, to ensure that assistance is provided as a collective family effort with everyone contributing to the cause.

He says that if support is only provided for the woman, it could contribute to family disintegration, especially in cases where the women have husbands, who could feel excluded, and, therefore, may not support ventures by their wives. Some men argue that when women get financial independence, they develop strong voices and are not afraid to speak up against anything they feel is not right. And that causes insecurity on the part of the men.

As a result, there are numerous examples where men have been included in the organization’s activities, and they have supported their wives to succeed, says Eceru, a husband and a father of three children.

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