Fr. Mubangizi empowers Karamojong Women to go off streets

Apr 07, 2021 Leader other stories 0

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Sheryl WuDunn, an American business executive writer, lecturer and Pulitzer Prize winner said, “If you economically empower a woman, she represents an enormous opportunity that can be transformative not only for her family and for her community, but at the aggregate level for the economy.”

This is the reason Fr John Bosco Mubangizi, a Comboni priest has decided to choose fourteen women from the Karamojong community living in Katwe and empower them financially as a pilot project.
Some of these women send their children on the streets of Kampala to beg for money, while others go to different markets like St Balikudembe and others close to them to sort stones and bugs from beans, groundnuts, rice and maize.

Fr Mubangizi said the only way of taking away the children from the streets is to financially empower their mothers so that instead of the children going to the streets to beg, they can go to school, and for the women to be able to take care of their families. In Katwe, he has started with fourteen women who he said each received Ugx 200,000 in the first phase and will be receiving more money if they don’t misuse the one given to them.

These women are supposed to reimburse the money with 5% interest, which interest is meant to help the other women willing to join the group.
The women said they would involve themselves in small income generating activities to be able to earn a decent life. Some are willing to begin marketing silverfish, cooking food, buying beans from Kampala and taking to Karamoja, while some will get involved in beads works.

Fr Mubangizi noted that the money he is using to help the women are gifts coming from his friends. He said the women’s group would be called Ekal Ngolo Ka akuj (The family of God) and it would be a branch of a similar project he began in Moroto at Nativity of our Lord, Matany Parish, while he was the parish priest in 2014. He added that the project in Matany has kicked off and it is self-sustaining. It has over one hundred women who each get Ugx 300,000 after every three months.

By Irene lamunu

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