The dirt path from my village, Nantabulirwa in Mukono District, to Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda is quite bumpy. I only noticed when I stopped along the way to sell my mother’s goat gift.
As a rural Ugandan young woman, I faced two "sanctions." The first was being born in an all-girls family which alone was considered a curse to my community and an extinction of the family’s lineage. The second was when my father suddenly ceased funding my education due to his disapproval of my social and political activism at university, claiming that it violated our family norms for women. As I sold my mother’s goat, I recalled what my mother told me before parting for a ten-year period; "If you don't create your own future, nobody will guarantee it for you."
While at university, I utilised my research and advocacy skills as a Social Sciences Student to found an independent career path. I coordinated youth activities and later became a field intern with Reproductive Health Uganda. This professional experience made me realise my strengths. I wanted to create equal opportunities for girls and boys to develop their untapped abilities and leverage their skills to make a larger impact in Uganda.
With this in mind, I joined Joy for Children Uganda as a space to advocate for girl’s rights, but also to engage with leaders at policy-making level. This gave me an opportunity of collaborating and partnering with state and non-state actors on strategies of ending child marriages, teenage pregnancies, and economic empowerment of women and girls.
Seven years down the road in advocacy work, I have inspired adolescent girls and young women follow their dreams and achieve dreams, contributed to Uganda’s legal framework in a number of ways. I participated in formulation of the National Sexuality Education Framework 2018 and The National Strategy to End Teenage Pregnancy and Child Marriage 2015 -2020; formation of Uganda’s Parliamentary Forum for Children affairs, a working group that identifies and tables child marriage issues before Parliament, and petitioned the Speaker of the Ugandan Parliament to expedite the enactment of the Marriage Bill 2009. I have openly pronounced myself on harmonising contradictory laws on ending child marriages, and currently the focal person for the Girls Not Brides Uganda Alliance at the Ugandan secretariat.
The status of women in Uganda is quite debased. Society expectations of a successful girl child are tied to marriage and childbearing, for which I deviate. I strive to be that female leader who transforms women’s status to have significant contribution in government’s accountability, economic development, human rights and putting an end to child marriage and teenage pregnancies.
In my heart, I will be always this young woman yearning to create a change in Uganda’s rural women’s situations, leading with my mother's advice, which is now accompanied by the broader realisation that; “If we women do not create our own future, nobody will guarantee it for us.”