Programme Approach

In line with Global Strategy and International Development Targets, Care Africa Community Initiatives Uganda ensures that its Programmes are in line with the Sustainable Development Goals including the strategies and Uganda’s second National Development Plan 2014/2015 to 2019/2020. The organization focuses on the following programme areas: Agriculture, Environment and Natural Resource Management and Climate change; Education and Skills development; Water, Sanitation and Hygiene and Health. It also pursues the following cross cutting themes: Advocacy, Youth Issues; Equality & Women empowerment, Disaster Risk Reduction & Humanitarian Response, Rights Based Approach and Organizational Learning.

Targeting

In spite of the fact that poverty levels in Uganda have fallen, the situation faced by the extremely poor has changed little, these chronically poor people are locked into poverty, whereby government national Programmes alone are unlikely to have a tangible impact on their lives. Similarly, Uganda’s Human Development Indicators (HDI) have been among the poorest in the world. Uganda’s 2013 HDI of 0.484 is below the average of 0.493 for countries in the low Human Development Index Group and below the average of 0.502 for countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Where we work

Care Africa Community Initiatives Uganda is not limited to where it operates in Uganda but it endeavors to target the poorest districts of the country as first priority. It overlooks this condition in instances of responding to emergencies. Human Development Indicators for different regions and districts are employed in decision making. Care Africa Community Initiatives Uganda harbor dreams of working beyond Uganda in the very near future.

Who we work with      

Care Africa Community Initiatives Uganda is committed to working with the poorest 5-10% of the population. Targeting of the very poor is one of our primary criteria in terms of partner selection and programme implementation. While it may be unrealistic to expect all Programmes to target only the extreme poor, Care Africa Community Initiatives Uganda will make a commitment to actively include the extreme poor in all its interventions.

This will be achieved in part by working in much poorer districts and can also be achieved by targeting certain vulnerable groups such as orphans and Vulnerable Children, disabled, female headed households and People living With HIV and AIDS. However, this will not be enough; Care Africa Community Initiatives Uganda commits itself to undertaking poverty analyses which identify the extreme poor, thereby generating more detailed desegregated data and enabling better project design to monitor progress in poverty alleviation and impact. In our analyses we must be open to the fact that extreme poverty is not only defined by money; we should also consider other factors such as empowerment, gender, disability, HIV and AIDS.

The argument for such vigorous targeting must be that Care Africa Community Initiatives Uganda is unlikely to have a major influence on all the poor of a country anyway and we know that shallow interventions are unlikely to have a sustainable impact on the extreme poor.  Extreme poor people are born poor and will remain so unless great efforts are made to identify the root causes and provide consistent support, resources, capacity building and empowerment; we have to recognise that one pig or a small loan will not be enough to break the multi-generational poverty; they will remain poor and so will their children.