Community leaders commit to end cultural practices violating children’s rights
"For while the practice is now openly shunned, people still secretly book girls without even their mothers’ knowledge."
Steven Musenero was 25 years old in 1985 when the guerrilla National Resistance Movement started taking and occupying territory in which it would set up administrative structures. The ‘liberated’ villages would elect their own administration under Resistance Councils (later Local Councils) and Musenero became chairman of his village in Kituti Parish of Bugoye sub county.
In subsequent elections, he became chairperson of Kitutu Parish and the former teacher who describes himself as a peasant has been returned unopposed in recent elections. Recently, having clocked 61, happily married to one wife and with eleven children, Musenero felt that 35 years of uninterrupted leadership was enough, and decided to call it a day and retire to his little farm on which soy bean occupies four acres.
But the people would not hear of his plans and exerted pressure on him to continue, which he agreed to reluctantly. Recently, Musenero was called upon to take part in the Spotlight Initiative training. After the UNICEF communication for development training which helped him to clearly see the link between the prevalent practices in his home area to poverty and misery occasioned by alcohol consumption and gender-based violence, Musenero felt a transformation descend over him. Suddenly, he saw the enormous work that needs to be done and how it can be done.
“I even wondered why I had been insisting on retiring,” he says as his eyes shine with excitement. “I am set to continue and will only stop when I expire.”
Freshly energized, Stephen Musenero has re- immersed himself in his job and has no contemplation of entertaining the “folly” of retiring anytime soon.
Top on his agenda now is to wean the residents of his parish off alcohol.
“There shall be no rest for me until domestic violence has been completely wiped out of the parish,”
“And it shall not be by force because that would not be sustainable. The people must decide themselves to stop boozing after understanding the benefits that await them and their children when they reduce the drinking.”
The administrative staff of Bugoye Sub County already share the same views. Juliet Kabugho, the Social Welfare Officer, has noticed that the peak boozing seasons are in April and September, when farmers earn from their coffee.
But besides alcohol, some other things the people of Kasese expend their resources on sound quite strange to an outsider.
There is the booking of pregnancies for example. Until about two decades ago, people would openly go to a home where a woman was pregnant and pledge to pay twelve goats for the child if it was a girl, for getting married to one of their sons. If it was a boy, they would wait patiently until she got a girl. At every visit, which could be once a year, they would take a goat and by the time the girl reached puberty, her parents willingly handed her to complete the transaction, to which she hadn’t been party, except as victim.
Many of today’s mothers were booked in that fashion. So people like Zainabu Asiimwe, a principal probation officer at the district and Juliet Kabugho are working tirelessly to persuade those who were booked in the womb not to book girls for their sons.
For while the practice is now openly shunned, people still secretly book girls without even their mothers’ knowledge.
A senior person in the clan receives the goats and at the appointed date, a claim for the girl is lodged and it takes serious interventions to prevent its being effected. In many cases, the claim is honoured.
In Karambi Parish, we find a UNICEF Communication for Development (C4D) training is just getting underway and on sitting in, discover that such problems are still alive in the mountain communities. The lead facilitator is Zuribaberi Kule, the Karambi Parish Chief who however is an old hand at C4D.
The trainings were implemented under the Spotlight Initiative which is a partnership between the European Union and United Nations. It is funded by the European Union and implemented in seven districts of Uganda, Kasese being one of them under the overall supervision of the Government of Uganda.
“What we look to achieve is enabling the para-social workers to know when to start the advocacy – to set the right conditions, for the social mobilization for achieving behavioural change,” Kule says. “Ultimately, we want these local social workers and the community to be able to sustain the advocacy long after this Spotlight Initiative is done.
The Karambi Community Development Officer Mr Thawite Mwira, says the trainings enable the para social workers and the stakeholders to network.
“The para socials, the local councillors, teachers and religious leaders are now well networked,” Mwira says.
