Title: Enhancing Women Farmers’ Adaptive Capacity to Cope with Climate Change in Kamuli District

Abstract

Kamuli district is located within Busoga region in Eastern Uganda, which lies in the lake basin climatic area with highly varied climatic conditions, ranging from severe droughts and flooding, to erratic rainfall, affecting the socio-economic development in the sub-region. Despite the endowment of natural resources, Busoga is one of the poorest sub-regions, coupled with the highest levels of Gender Based Violence (GBV) (The New Vision Paper 2015). With increasing effects of climate change, the levels of food insecurity and malnutrition are high (The New Vision Newspaper 2009). Despite Uganda´s progress in providing policies and frameworks that are supportive of gender equality, gender imbalances have remained, especially in decision-making, access, and control of resources. Increasingly, studies show that there will be no climate justice without gender equity (Terry, 2009). In Uganda, women are still marginalised especially during the implementation of the policy priority areas; yet, they form the majority of the labour force. It is, therefore, important to build on women´s strength, priorities, and relationship to the environment, as put forward by eco-feminists, to increase their ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster resilience in their agriculture livelihoods. The proposed project will, therefore, contribute towards strengthening adaptive capacity and improving the livelihoods of the rural population, in order to enhance the resilience of women in Kamuli district with the specific objectives of: increasing capacity development of farmers and extension district staff to implement and adopt good practices for increased resilience and climate change adaptation; strengthening of district and lower local government´s knowledge and capacities for gender-sensitive climate change programming; challenging gender stereotypes through household gender equality advocacy and household mentoring, and promotion of local monitoring, farmer exposure, and documentation of good practices for replication in households. The project will be implemented using the Farmer Field Schools (FFS) methodology which capitalises on participatory capacity building, and the main target beneficiaries will be women as well as men, through constructive ways of promoting intra-household power relations and dynamics in terms of decision making, ownership, and control of livelihoods assets. The project will also promote “He for She”, to create alliances between men and women to enhance ecological sustainability through household mentoring methodologies, and Gender Action Learning Systems (GALS). The project has five output areas, namely: the promotion of participatory capacity development, climate-smart technologies, and practices in agriculture adaptation; strengthening household gender equality advocacy through household mentoring; promoting exposure, local monitoring, and documentation of good practices; stimulating alternative livelihood system strengthening and adaptation, and; strengthening the capacity of district and lower local governments’ officials to integrate gender in climate change interventions.