PELUM Uganda has enjoyed great collaboration with Oxfam since 2006. Our journey together has been very rewarding. In the earlier years, we greatly profited from institutional strengthening of PELUM Uganda, her members and the farmers on Farmer Led Documentation and Knowledge sharing.
Later on, we started to jointly tackle issues on poverty and injustice, where we promoted agriculture market development for smallholder farmers while addressing gender injustices using the Gender Action Learning Systems (GALS) Methodology.
GALS has now become a household methodology within PELUM Uganda. We have extensively used GALS in value chain development and have also developed models of integration of the methodology in climate change, advocacy, land rights and seed security interventions. With GALS, gender justice results are assured for generations.
In the more recent years, Oxfam took on a new approach in which we have been working as partners. We are jointly working on emerging development concerns of the spiraling inequality and together, we are confronting drivers of inequality such as land grabbing and gender inequality as well as building resilience of farming communities through enabling them realize their right to food as a way of narrowing the growing gap between the rich and the poor.
Our focus has been on influencing policy processes and changes in favor of the marginalized communities.
I am proud to say that over the years, the collaboration between PELUM Uganda and Oxfam has successfully reached over 300,000 vulnerable men and women in Uganda.
Through our collaboration, PELUM Uganda has had great learnings on research and documentation, influencing, gender mainstreaming and most importantly looking beyond poverty to its underlying issues and concerns of governance, inequality and injustice.
As we move towards the future, we look forward to further collaboration with Oxfam to confront the emerging inequality catastrophe in Uganda.
By Stella Grace Lutalo, Country Coordinator, PELUM Uganda