Missed Opportunities

Project Publicity and Improved Visibility

Project Narrative

The lack of a sensitive and effective response to domestic violence and the social pressure to keep it silent and private, find their roots in the deeply embedded cultural and social norms and values. Feelings of shame, guilt backlash and lack of support from family and society often leave women entrapped within violent abusive situations. It is critical, therefore, that any attempt to transform the situation must enable fundamental normative changes to occur in institutions across society. BUVAD’s approach of training women in constructing affordable large scale rainwater harvesting tanks along with raising their awareness of their rights is an integrated approach that will empower them to overcome abuse and exploitation by their husbands along with related water fetching challenges in rural communities of Kayunga District. This will not only empower them with skills but will create a source of employment and hence earn additional income to their households. Re-using waste plastic bottles to construct affordable large scale rainwater harvesting tanks is on addition, an innovative approach aimed at eliminating the environmental hazard of accumulating carelessly littered waste plastic bottles without burning to minimize on carbon emissions and raise environmental awareness, while using the waste plastic bottles profitably to harvest rainwater in large quantities in communities, substituting mud bricks that require cutting trees to bake them. BUVAD is using this innovative technology of affordable waste plastic bottle bricks-water harvesting tanks construction to empower women with knowledge and skills. BUVAD having identified water fetching as a key source of women abuse and exploitation in rural communities, intends to conduct training workshops among the most exploited and most abused gender the women whom are most abused through water fetching and are the key household water fetchers in remote rural Kayunga. These will be 50 women parents at each of the 12 selected project host community primary schools in Kayunga District of Uganda, followed by creation of the women trainees' community chains - water tanks construction cooperatives targeting the participants’ self-construction of 600 water harvesting tanks for 600 households in a united manner and an additional 12 model tanks at the 12 workshop host schools, whereby each training workshop host school will benefit with one 10,000ltrs water tank. The approach is that with BUVAD funding towards material subsidy, the created women community chains water tanks construction cooperatives group/s will go constructing for each member in a sequence within a period of 5 years after the training period. The women will subdivide each village chain rain water harvesting tank construction committee into sub groups of 5 each. This will mean that in a month 10 tanks will be constructed and by end of year they will have constructed 120 tanks hence, 120 water-harvesting tanks for 120 households will be constructed per year for 5 years to make 600 rainwater harvesting tanks. Through the created women community chains - water tanks construction cooperatives the women will develop a stronger bonding to collectively overcome abuse and exploitation by their husbands. Meanwhile even those from women headed families will be more strengthened to vehemently manage their household sustainability challenges. After the women training and awareness raising period of 2 years, the BUVAD project monitoring and evaluation team will as has been its usual routine follow up on the tanks construction process over the next 5 years’ rain water harvesting households tanks construction process by the created women trainees’ community chains - water tanks construction cooperatives.