John Paul Livestock Women Group, Mukono Distric.

With the aim of supporting these families and following the proposal of our local coordinators, in 2014 we created 5 Cooperatives of Livestock Women.

Each cooperative is made up of 5 women -selected by local development associations for being in a situation of special vulnerability-. We provide these cooperatives with permanent facilities (concrete pigsties with metal cover; see figure 1), two females, a stallion and feed for a year, so that they can raise pigs that they can sell later to buy food and pay their children’s school fees. Likewise, the manure is useful for restoring fertility to their gardens, whose plant remains feed the pigs themselves, completing this way a sustainable agricultural production cycle, similar to that of schools.

For their part, these cooperatives undertake to donate part of the newborn piglets to extend the project to new groups of women. Thus, there are currently 10 groups, that is, 50 large families who directly benefit from the project.

Objectives and activities:

In this context, the main objectives of this line of work started in 2014 in the context of the Saluganda project are:

• • • Improve the living conditions of these families, providing them with income;
    • Promote the empowerment of women through cooperative work and agricultural training;
    • Facilitate the schooling of their children and / or grandchildren, thanks to the fact that they can now pay their school fees.

Members of TuKolere Livestock Women Cooperative making reusable pads during one of the menstrual health workshops.

To do this, in addition to creating a new cooperative each year and providing it with the infrastructure and the necessary means for its self-sufficiency, we maintain the support for the previous ones through:

• • • Financial support: 4 bags of 100kg feed, equivalent to half of their annual requirements.
    • Annual agricultural training workshops: ways to supplement the animals’ diet with byproducts from home gardens, composting and using manure as fertilizer, distribution of non-hybrid seeds, etc.
    • Menstrual health workshops and distribution of children’s clothing collected during the year (Image 2).
    • Veterinary services: Antiparasitics, etc.

Finally, in 2020, in addition to creating the eleventh group and continuing to support the previous ten, we intend to provide these families with solar cookers, with the dual objective of improving their quality of life and generating new income from their sale, since they will be able to make them by themselves with homemade materials.

Solar cooker made from homemade materials, with capacity for 10l (family size)