Women are the main farmers of food in Africa, and western Uganda specifically, and are the main caregivers of children, responsible for food provision. They face the triple burden of farming, food provision and childcare with little help from male members of the household. In Kasese District of western Uganda, women need support to improve crop diversity and productivity. Many women lack access to land, reflecting structural inequalities along gender and ethnic lines, and these inequalities translate into food insecurity.¹ These challenges make them especially vulnerable to climate change.

Eighty-five percent of households in this area make a living as subsistence farmers on degraded land, and hunger and malnutrition are chronic issues. Poor health is associated with poor nutrition, which exacerbates vulnerability to disease and illness. Climate change impacts livelihoods and farming, and thus food and income generation. More than 40% of children 5-59 months old have stunted growth, and 13% are diagnosed as wasted. Better nutrition is essential for improving the health status of children and their school performance, the effectiveness of anti-retroviral therapy, and for preventing common diseases such as malaria for all household members.

Rwenzori Center for Research and Advocacy (RCRA) is working to establish 1,000 organic home gardens and 80 community gardens managed by women living in rural areas and small towns in Kasese. Small-scale organic gardens empower women to feed their families with nutritious foods, generate income, buffer against illness and hunger, and nurture the soil. Additionally, to increase economic empowerment and food security among women who lack land, the 1,000 Women’s Gardens promotes collective gardening on rented land. The program also uses gardening as an entry point to disseminate information on and services for family planning and sexual/reproductive health (FP-SRH), and clean water and sanitation for improved overall health. Many of the gardeners are young mothers who face stigma, isolation and physical abuse by fathers and sexual partners. Their integration into RCRA’s program breaks this isolation, gives them the means to avoid future transactional sex and feed their children, and allows some to return to school.

As of March 2024, 3.5 years into the project, participating women have established 550 home gardens and 46 community gardens. The gardens are monitored by Model Garden Volunteers, women chosen from the community for their leadership and gardening skills, to ensure sustained success over time. Young mothers need more than SRH information and services - they need a way to earn their own income to cover basic needs and avoid transactional sex and unwanted pregnancies in the future. In the Kasese context, vegetable gardening is a reliable, low-cost and socially acceptable livelihood for these young mothers

Since 2023, the program has integrated a component of sexual and reproductive health education and services for 500 adolescent mothers who are also trained in organic gardening. To supplement RCRA’s technical support for the integrated project, the local university was invited to provide training to the women’s groups on how to respond to climate change in their daily lives. Strategies to protect their health and livelihoods include, for instance, deep mulching and flood protection of gardens, and avoiding the burning of crop residues.

Together with local government, RCRA provides services beyond 1,000 Women’s Gardens through mobile clinics and health centers, serving these women living in remote mountainous areas with reproductive, maternal and newborn health services. Adolescent first-time mothers are especially targeted for information about care of infants and birth spacing practices with modern contraception. They are learning to care for themselves and to care for the gardens they are cultivating. Some of the young mothers return to school, with a few aspiring to attend the local university..

An integrated, grassroots approach to programming is an effective way to work on the major challenges of women’s food insecurity and poor health associated with climate change. The key has been to integrate a climate-resilient livelihood (organic gardening), strategies for preventing climate-induced land degradation, and access to general and reproductive health services that together meet the needs of vulnerable women, especially young mothers. RCRA’s health delivery innovations bring services to remote households and also serve as pathways for emergency health support during climate-related crises, such as flooding, which occurs more severely every year. Further, RCRA learned that a cost-effective and sustainable way to ensure integrated support for women in the long run is by engaging local women leaders, which they did through Model Gardener and Young Mother Volunteers. Recognizing that the volunteer model can be complex and can compete with income-generation and caregiving, the program provides small stipends.

The Model Gardener Volunteers (MGV) and Young Mother Volunteers (YMV) programs are important innovations of RCRA’s integrated programming, as they ensure continual cost-effective support for gardeners and young mothers and build the experience and confidence of women to give back to their communities by transferring their skills and being agents for social change. Moreover, the MGV and YMV programs recognize that transformative change, especially for adolescent mothers facing extreme isolation and stigma, is a process over time and one that addresses all of the needs and aspirations of the whole adolescent. It requires not just SRH information, not just skill-building, not just socialization, not just acknowledgement and discussion of harmful gender norms, but all of this together.

Climate-Resilient Organic Vegetable Gardens Alongside Sexual and Reproductive Health Care: Harsh Realities in a Difficult Landscape

The Power of an Integrated Approach

Cultivating Healthy Women and Agriculture...

Results

Lessons Learned

1000 Women's Gardens for Health and Nutrition

¹ Tinkasimire, C. B., Mwine, J., & Musinguzi, P. S. (2023). The Extent to Which Land Conflicts Affect Food Security: A Case of Kasese District, Western Uganda.

Photo by Markus Distelrath

Photo by Shalev Cohen

Photo by Ganta Srinivas:

Video by Mikhail Nilov

Video by Tom Fisk

Video by Sanjeewa Wijebandara

Join Group