Maxensia Takirambule, Takes “The Stand for Her Land (S4HL)”

 Maxensia Takirambule, Takes “The Stand for Her Land (S4HL)”

Mayimuna is a widow whose husband died in a Road Traffic Accident along Kampala-Masaka Road. The husband’s body was brought home at 3:00pm and arrangements were made for burial. As soon as the husband was laid to rest, Mayimuna was asked by some relatives of the husband to leave the home and return to her parents. Fortunately, not all the relatives were happy with this. The ones who wanted her gone were overwhelmed by the ones who wanted her to stay. She stayed but she knew she had to secure her stable housing, food security, dignity, permanence, sense of routine and order in her life. She had five children to look after. The children needed to have their right to belonging, a homestead, protection and preservation secured. This is one of the many stories that women tell.

 The Stand for Her Land (S4HL) Campaign is a global advocacy campaign that aims to accomplish lasting change on the ground through collective actions at grassroots, national, and global levels towards securing women’s land rights.  The campaign aims to strengthen the land rights and tenure security of women across contexts (rural, peri-urban, and urban), across tenure systems (statutory, customary, individual, and communal) and across communities (Indigenous, forest, pastoral, agricultural) around the world.

Women’s land rights are a fundamental human right. These rights are foundational to agency, autonomy, self-determination, productivity, and gender equality.

When a woman holds secure rights to her land, power dynamics shift. Her dignity, household decision-making, and economic freedom increase. In the case of Mayimuna, her land rights helped her to break a pending cycle of poverty and destitution. She stayed at her home and exploited the land resource to the fullest. She managed to go on with the plans they had made with the late husband. She introduced mixed farming and demonstration plots in her area. The produce and the money from the different training sessions given at her premises, improved not only their own lives, but those of other families and the communities in the area.

The benefits multiplied. Mayimuna was a peer to other women and girls in the area. She was the example given anecdotally as far as land-related investments went. She was able to put all her children to school, took care of herself as a widow, she improved her home and built small self-contained rentals. She was even able to perform a Hijra. The standard of living improved in form of health, wellbeing, rain-water harvests, sanitation, proper housing with plumbing, utilities were present, and she maintained quality household nutrition. In owning and managing her land, she was able to invest and improve on her asset base. This further linked her to mechanisms through which she participated in addressing the gender gaps which affect issues of climate change, food security, and global health.

Mayimuna’s case is unique. Unfortunately, new evidence continues to show that despite all the contributions, secure women land rights play in fulfilling gender equality and advancing global sustainable development, control and ownership of land by women remains precarious.

There is a crosscutting importance of secure women’s land rights. We need to ensure that all women have secure land rights because they help to transform women and girls’ lives.  We need to come out strongly to show case examples where women have contributed to self-development and that of the community, they live in.  We have to address social cultural norms and traditions that deprive women of leadership, ownership and control of natural resources including land. Strong laws and policies mean little to women and girls without effective implementation and enforcement.

I am so proud to take “The Stand for Her Land” and be part of the campaign which aims to undertake collective advocacy to break down barriers and close this implementation gap between national, regional and global commitments and local practice in regard to women’s land rights to build a future where all women and men have a secure place to call home. We thank the teams we work with, CBOs, CSOs, NPOs, NGOs, the German Government for undertaking to sponsor the campaign actions in Uganda, Senegal and Ethiopia through joint collaboration between Landesa and the campaign steering committee composed of International non-governmental organizations with world renowned expertise and reach on Women’s land rights.

 

 

 

Maxensia Takirambule, The CEO Lungujja Community Health Care Organization (LUCOHECO)

Friday Spotlight

Maxensia Takirambule, CEO Lungujja Community Health Care Organization (LUCOHECO)

Meet Maxensia Takirambule a human rights activist who passionately lifts many others in spirit and physically.

The saying "disability is not inability," is exemplified in her work.

She founded one of the first privately run community based healthcare services targeting Persons With Disabilities (PWD) in Uganda, pushed for Universal Health Care Coverage (UHC) and Micro-Credit access for PWDs, access to HIV/TB/Malaria Prevention integrating COVID-19 Response and Recovery, and she broke many other ceilings including this, access to equity, land and assets by PWDs.

Lungujja Community Health Care Organization (LUCOHECO) is an NGO in Uganda.

We wish them well.

#EndTB

#betterfoodsystems

#povertymustnotwin

#investincommunities

#endpoverty

#bettertogether

#EndMalaria

#investincommunitiesendtb

#breakcovidnow

#investincommunitiestosavelives

#standforherland

 

Land Makes a Difference; Women Contribute to Housing Stability, Food Security And Economic Sustenance

 Land Makes a Difference

When we join the ‘Stand for her land' campaign we are there because land makes a difference in our lives.

When we join the ‘Stand for her land' we are there because through participation we show that a woman has land rights too.

 When we join the ‘Stand for her land' we are there because we find our footing while standing, sitting, lying, working, building, planting, or harvesting on the land.

 When we join the ‘Stand for her land' we are there because through participation we show that through owning land a woman enjoys the fullness of productivity.

When we join the ‘Stand for her land' we are there because through our presence we lay claim to the narrative that women, ownership or access to land, pursuit of economic agency, autonomy, self-determination and productivity are tied together.

When we join the ‘Stand for her land' we are there because through our voice we say that land in Uganda is a key productive asset on which many livelihoods depend.

When we join the ‘Stand for her land' we are there because we build the numbers and become the collective to secure land rights for women.

When we join the ‘Stand for her land' we are there because women owning land means they have the means to stable housing, food security and economic sustenance.

When we join the ‘Stand for her land' we are there because land makes a difference.

 

LUCOHECO's Collaboration With Makerere University College of Health Sciences and St. Mary's Hospital Lubaga

A Collaboration With Makerere University College of Health Sciences and St. Mary's Hospital Lubaga

We provide the space for conducting TB screening services at the grassroots

This is the planned community outreach through which we bring services nearer to our beneficiaries.

We hope this collaboration goes on until we kick TB Away.

We want many out there to know that TB is treatable and curable.

We thank Dr. Mpanga Meddie of Lubaga Hospital who in conjunction with Makerere university support grassroots in many ways.

We hope to connect them to people in this effort to eradicate TB, train communities to stay negative and link the communities to livelihood projects.

TB is treatable and curable.

TB Must Not Win

#investincommunitiestosavelives

#EndTB

#investincommunitiesendtb

#endpoverty #EndMalaria

#breakcovidnow

#povertymustnotwin

#investincommunities

#EndHIV

 

 

TB Prevention, Care, Mitigation Justice Communities of Practice-COP

 TB Prevention, Care, Mitigation Justice Communities of Practice-COP

Non-technology and technology-based mobilization is increasingly used to enhance management practices in the health sector. These include but are not limited to planned physical meetings, utilizing noticeboards, peer-networks formation, word-of-mouth, text-sharing, information systems, procurement systems and payment systems. To stimulate and accelerate shared learning around the utility and best practices of the mobilization innovations, the LUCUHECO in conjuction with the Advocacy Network Africa (AdNetA) propose a Community of Practice (CoP). 

This congregates grassroots-based community groups with the Public-Private Mix. In this milieu, people share concerns, interests, or passion for health promotion, health preservation and health services demand and delivery by interacting regularly with people undertaking similar pursuits. The CoP provides a forum for knowledge building, resource mobilization, information exchange, sustained interaction, referral network formation and sustenance, content curation, and professional networking which facilitates shared learning on processes, experiences, and evidence of effective performance of programmes/campaigns.

Through sharing within this community of practice we hope to enhance and inform national, regional, and global efforts toward eradication of poverty, harmful practices, HIV/TB and Malaria that grassroots-based organizations contribute to by fostering and supporting evidence-based and evidence-driven decision making in Sub Saharan Africa.

 

Our Goals and Objectives

Goals

• Establish and facilitate information exchange by connecting PWD-led communities to service providers, health workers, managers, providers, and funders.
• Promote, advance, and support grassroots-based knowledge formation around healthy living practices and learning mapping/monitoring efforts.
• Be interactive, collaborative, and available.

Objectives

• Promote coordination by sharing information on current activities, outcome reports or planned research activities.
• Encourage the use of appropriate implementation and monitoring approaches, including strengths, limitations, innovations, unintended consequences, and case studies.
• Collate and generate evidence on best practices on case studies.

The CoP is coordinated by a steering committee drawn from individuals from the CBOs, CSOs, NGOs, Local Government, academia, and private organizations. The CoP will focus on these topical areas.

• Scoping-Establish elements that promote an integral health promotion, preservation, and service structural organization
• Mapping — Mapping experiences in health promotion, health preservation, and health services.
• Curating – synthesizing and evaluating good practices, innovative approaches.
• Referral Networking- Packaging, sharing evidence and linking with like minded colleagues.
• Monitoring benchmarks-These will be tagged to physical, social, identity, gender, cultural, political and economic factors in order to elicit better standards of living.

Health, Preservation and Services Campaigns in Sub-Saharan Africa

The grassroots can be elevated to levels of compliance by identifying and training campaign health workers (TB Cough tracers/Vaccinators/educators/VHTs) in seeking knowledge and skills that leverage healthy living lifestyles since many become peers to their fellow community members.

Research shows that trained peer health workers in Africa are more likely to have better understanding of their local areas and to make an impact or impression on others than someone from outside the community. They can be supported to engage in effective campaigns fostering and supporting evidence-based and evidence-driven decision making in Africa.

Grassroots based mobilization and linkages to referral for optimal benefits and quality life outcomes. This is a conceptual understanding of the potential impacts and linkage to health system performance, provider well-being, and patient outcomes.

We also aim to learn how these grassroots/community-based systems strengthen or disrupt the complex health system.

1.     What is the utility of the grassroots/community-based entities for improving / care performance ?  / Share evidence on the models used.

2.     What barriers have been experienced in rolling out grassroots/community-based services and how have these been bridged?

3.     How do we ensure that PWD-led grassroots/community-based services improve the performance of development/healthcare workers/TB/HIV/Malaria/COVID-19 vaccination campaigners through reporting effective performance?