Uganda has been called “the Pearl of Africa” for its lush tropical flora, natural resources and mountains that are capped with glaciers known as the Rwenzori “Mountains of the Moon”. Located in sub-Saharan Africa, many Ugandans struggle with poverty, access to clinics and food security. This is especially true in southwestern Uganda where GlobalRise supports local stakeholders to change life for the Bakonzo and other tribes in Kasese District.
Operating now for 7 years in this area, GlobalRise initially conducted a household survey with a local NGO, Mbalhamia Healing Forest (MHF), and found the prevalence of stunting to be over 60% in Kirembe – about 1,650 households located in the Rwenzori foothills in Kasese District. Here, life is very difficult and not getting better. To earn money, women walk for hours on muddy paths that span like spiderwebs across steep terrain to reach the market to sell whatever they can carry on their head often with a baby on their back. Earning about 82 cents per day, they struggle mostly alone and forgotten in the mountains.
When GlobalRise began our work in Kasese, we teamed with Christalis Home, an orphanage. Providing technical expertise and funds to build a “Farm to Plate” protocol, we began nourishing the kids, fortifying their tiny bodies with better food management. This was a complete labor of love but what we didn’t know was that our team was leap frogging years of learning via community interactions (see GlobalRise in Action). We expanded scope, at the request of community leadership at the Kasese Better Living Center (KBLC), to create a new Community Nutrition Program (CNP), an intervention based at MHF.
Galvanizing a group of local stakeholders motivated by the motif to “Kick Stunting Out of Kasese!”, GlobalRise successfully sourced a grant from the UN FAO Mountains and Islands Program, funding the “AdFORD-MHF-DFS Mountain Center” (DFS means Digital Food System, a development tool created by GlobalRise within the Rockefeller 2050 Food Systems Vision Prize). An anchor in this project is Rwenzori International University, the first licensed university in Kasese District. Maintaining a seat on the University’s Board of Directors, GlobalRise developed a new training platform with MHF for farming students which supports sustainability of the community nutrition program (CNP).
For our key milestones please see the following: