Gender Equality

Gender equality is one of the Norwegian parliaments 5 main priorities, and is an important part of our development aid with Uganda. The main issues for women in Uganda are education for girls, landrights and inheritance rights, protection against domestic violence, improvement of water and sanitation facilities and health care. In the field of gender equality, the embassy currently supports the following projects:

• The Norwegian Refugee Council receives support for their ICLA program– Information Counselling and Legal Assistance whose core component is training of paralegals and information and counselling work in the camps. A substantial part of the program is based around women’s rights, including violence against women and landrights. ICLA is part of the programme IDP return facilitation in Uganda which receives a total of NOK11 milllion over 3 years.

• Unifem‘s project Women’s role in Peacebuilding in the framework of 1325, has the objective of getting women participation, and increasing the focus on the special needs of women in the peace negotiations in Juba.  The project has involved several of the women’s organisations of Uganda, both on the national level and in the districts. Norway supports the project with NOK 423 000 as a one-time payment. The other donors are SIDA and UNDP.

• Market Vendors AIDS Project, has been a great success and is often mentioned as  best practice in the AIDS sector in Kampala. Project implements informaiton and prevention work in 3 markets in Kampala, and the majority of the beneficiaries are women. The total support for the project has been NOK 8 million.

• Norway has for several years been supporting Makerere Universiy which started gender equality work in 1998, and entered into a 4-year agreement with the university in 2005 to support the gender mainstreaming division with NOK 1,7 million. This division works to ensure that gender is mainstreamed in research and development of curricula, as well as contributing to positive changes in the policies of the university. There are ongoing discussions on support to the Department of Women and Gender Studies, including their research work on women in conflict areas.


Source: Nina Wessel email: niwe@mfa.no   |   Share on your network   |   print