A few words about

What We Do

Our projects

Advancing girls’ leadership by working directly with girls

Life Skills Training(DEAL)

This Life Skills training is aimed at achieving Ywide’s strategic goal of advancing girl’s leadership by working directly with girls. The training focuses on building leadership skills, dealing with emotions, conflict and peace, rights and responsibilities, gender relation, sexual and reproductive health, parenting, personal choice among other modules. The aim is to make girls make constructive decisions that propel them to continue with education and delay early union and early pregnancy.
This Life Skills training builds and strengthens the girls’ decision making ability so as to make decisions that transform their lives, they rediscover themselves and learn new things to enable them live a dignified life and be supportive to themselves, strengthen their self-confidence and build positive relationships with their peers, family and wider community.

The beneficiaries of this activity, have now formed Girls Leadership Club in Angaya Primary school and Young Women Leadership Group in the community of Unyama “B” village and Coopil village in Unyama Sub County in Gulu District in Uganda. The is aimed at promoting continuous mentorship, molding and shaping of girls’ behaviors and habits in the community. The creation of this Leadership group is to establish a model group where other young girls at schools and in the community, clubs and other groups come to learn positive behavioral change. So far over 1,000 girls and young women have benefited from this activity.

Mentorship activity

To back up the Life Skills training, Ywide identifies female role models for mentorship program with the aim to provide the opportunity for the group members to see the fruits of leadership, education and have self-control and determination in order to delay early marriage and pregnancy for the girls at school to enable them achieve their goals and also to hear a real and personal life stories from the guests which inspire, encourage and give them hope to be strong, confident, focused and determined to succeed in life. The Female Role Models are always provided with the details of the aim and purpose of her meeting with the groups and her discussion is always based on the strategic goal of the project (prevention and response to child marriage and teenage pregnancy/ Advancing the girls’ leadership skills). On the other hand, through this activity the project aims to achieve its strategic goal of advocating for the establishment and implementation of effective laws and policies.

Female Role Model so far invited for the program are;

Hon. Aol Betty Ocan, the Leader of Opposition in the Parliament of the Republic of Uganda who is also the Woman Member of Parliament for Gulu District on 17th of October 2019 and she met with the “Waribo Cingwa” Leadership Group who are the Girls First Fund beneficiaries in Unyama “B” village in Unyama Sub County. She mentored the group members and encouraged them to work hard and she thanked those beneficiaries who have made up their minds to go back to school and encouraged them to continue with education so that they become future leaders in their community at the parish, sub county, district and national level.

Mrs Christine Akello Lutara a known activist, scientist and advocate for girls education who worked both in Europe and Africa on Girls and Women projects with various organization and currently lives in Gulu. She is not a politician but a development worker whose aim is to see people achieve their goals through hard work. Her invitation was aimed at show casing women’s success stories and inspiring young girls and women to delay marriage and early pregnancy so as to address the risk and vulnerability that expose girls and young women to income insecurity and social deprivation, leading to undignified lives. Initially she was invited to visit the project beneficiaries but the school authority requested that she should meet all the pupils in Angaya primary school and she mentored both girls and boys. The activity took place at Angaya Primary school in Unyama Sub County in Gulu district.

Mobilizing families, community and influencers

Community Sensitization activity

This activity is aimed at achieving YWIDE’s strategic goal of reaching out to the community, families and the opinion leader whose voices are respected by many in the community to join hands together to prevent and respond to child marriage and teenage pregnancy. This activity also helps the project to achieve the strategic goal of advancing girls leadership through dialogue.

Community dialogue

Community dialogue carried out purposely to build and create a strong background for a paradigm shift for transforming minds sets in the community in order to advance the girl’s and women’s agenda at all levels and identifying new ways of promoting gender equity and equality. The activity is attended bykey members of the community and Child Protection committee, local leaders and the community influencers.

The dialogue meetings opened the eyes of the people in the community where we operate and victims of abuse, torture, psychological torture, rape have started reporting cases to the Child Protection Committee in their areas. Some of the cases that require counseling, Ywide has been able to handle them and those that needed a specialized services were referred accordingly.

Class by Class meeting with the parents and their children

The objective of this activity is to create a close working relationship with the parents and teachers to prevent and respond to child marriage and teenage pregnancy and to reduce the rate of school dropout in rural primary schools. This meeting provides the opportunity for the parents, teachers together with the children and the school governing body like the Parents Teachers Association (PTA) and the School Management Committee (SMC) to discuss challenges and factors that forces the girls to get married and pregnant and later drop out of school when they are still children. The discussion during the class by class meeting looks at factors at family, community and school level.

Providing direct services to at-risk, married, and formerly married girls

Legal services

We work hand in hand with other partners to provide legal services to our beneficiaries. As a result of the intervention, Ywide has been receiving cases reported by the project allies and stakeholders in the community. Those that are handled by Ywide have been well handled other were referred for specialized services and follow ups were made.

IGA (Income Generating Activities) Beads training.

Beneficiaries of Life Skills training are given the opportunity to attend beads making training (using the beads to make expensive women hand bags), they are also engage in Village Saving and Loan Association (VSLA) they also practice various traditional dances to strengthen their Music Dance and Drama activity. This is done to create skills to enable earn a living.