Plant For My Future

Problem

Over the past years, pastoral communities in Eastern Uganda have faced numerous droughts attributed to climate change, intensifying the adverse impacts on food security for a population of over 2 million, with nearly  500,000 children experiencing acute malnutrition or worse. For many families in the Eastern part of Uganda, their survival hinges on livestock, as these animals provide essential nutrition, with milk being a vital component in children’s diets, and the rearing and sale of livestock serving as the primary source of livelihood. These droughts have brought about food and water insecurity for both families and their animals.

This issue is not only in the Eastern parts of Uganda but also cuts across countries in the Horn of Africa like Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia. According to the UN, millions of animals have already perished, and an additional 22 million animals remain in jeopardy due to the ongoing droughts. The dire situation is further compounded by the fact that 7 million children are experiencing acute malnutrition and urgently require assistance to avert starvation and regain their well-being. This is especially critical for children under 5 years of age and expectant or nursing mothers.

Over 40 million people in the Horn of Africa are already being affected by these droughts especially women and children according to the UN.

In summary, communities in the Eastern part of Uganda are struggling to adapt and cope with the changing climate. This problem also cuts across the other countries in the Horn of Africa.

The solution involves providing water retention facilities, planting trees, and providing climate education to communities in the eastern parts of Uganda.

For each village, we will install a solar water pump that will pump water from the ground to separate water tanks. These water tanks will have taps where people will be able to collect water for use.

Besides the facility, we plan to also install rain water collection points into water storage tanks such that the rain water is stored in the tanks for households.

Before the installation of the facility, we will have workshops with communities in the local language to help them understand the effects of climate change and how they can adapt and fight it. We will later plant some trees around the community with the community members, and collect information from the people on where we can install the facility.

Participants will be community members, especially families who have suffered from the severe impacts of droughts; with a target of about 20 families for the start.

For each family, we will take a record of the family head’s names, contacts, GPS location, and view of the home. This will be for easy monitoring and evaluation. I will also take brief interviews on how the droughts have affected the family in different ways.

The solution will ensure that there is a constant water supply for communities in the eastern part of Uganda such that during droughts before are not forced to take long treks to fetch water for both themselves and their animals. 

This solution will cover 20 households per village for the start. The eastern parts of Uganda is home to the Iteso tribe and the Karamojong who are mainly pastoralists and farmers. With the provision of this service, I believe that the issue of water scarcity will have been solved hence allowing people to farm and also animals to have reliable sources of water for survival. 

In simple terms, it will help such communities adapt to the impacts of these severe droughts.

We are a team of 55 members. 6 Members are part of the Board and Working group managers. The board consists of 2 members and working group managers consist of 4 members each heading the social media/communications working group, the strategy/planning working group, the finance working group, and the project working group respectively.

With this team, we have been able to organize community visits in Pallisa in Eastern Uganda to plant trees and sensitize the communities about the impacts of climate change and how they can adapt and fight it. Specifically, we have had 8 visits in areas of Pallisa.

For each visit, we organize workshops about climate change and adaptation with the help of specific trainers in the field. We then take a record of the people who have attended (names, contacts, GPS location, photos, number of family members, number of cattle, economic activity carried out) for each family. This is collected by the volunteers who are 49 in number.

This information is collected and then given to the project working group to keep records. The project working group is also in charge of following up the community members to monitor how they are and whether they have kept the planted trees in good condition.

Quality Education

Through our workshops, we have been able to provide rural communities with enough knowledge about climate change, adaptation, and mitigation.

With this knowledge, communities have been able to manage their habits toward the environment in terms of disposing of plastic waste, community-based plastic clean ups, and voluntary advocacy against climate change.

Communities have also been able to understand the importance of trees in mitigating climate change and the relevance of protecting them.

Climate Action

We have planted over 500 trees in Pallisa and ensured that each household protects and keeps the trees we have planted in their compound. With these trees we have restored the ecosystem in Pallisa and also mitigated climate change.

We would like solve to better structure our activities by offering technical, financial, and legal advice on our projects.

We would also like to connect and partner with solve on the different upcoming projects that we plan to run in the future as an NGO.

Besides that, we would like the voices of affected communities to also be amplified with more partnerships that Solve can help us connect with.

What makes our solution innovative is the fact that nothing much has been done in the eastern regions to help our communities to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Considering a scenario we encountered where the government could not handle providing these communities with food and water we decided that we needed to do something to solve this problem hence coming up with this plan. 

I believe that with more support we will be able to help such communities adapt to the impacts of climate change, mitigate it, and also provide action for climate empowerment through climate education to rural and marginalized communities.

We expect my solution to provide water security for the communities which will lead to long-term positive impacts in that the water availability with provide water for farming, home use, and also for cattle. Meaning that when people can farm and cattle can get water and pasture, the communities will also have survived food insecurity bringing about healthy living communities. In other words, communities will be able to adapt to the severe impacts of these droughts. 

A few case studies are listed below:

https://blogs.worldbank.org/wa...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

Goal

The project goal is to provide adaptation solutions for the communities where I come from to reduce the impacts that they face due to climate change.

Objectives

• To improve water security during drought seasons

• To improve food security for families in the communities.

• To improve water and food security for the animals (cattle)

Monitoring and Evaluation

We plan to collect details of the names, contacts and emails of the community members who will participate in the project. This will provide me with a benchmark to follow up on then regarding how helpful the project has been. 

We will then compare the results obtained from them with my goals and objectives of the project. Using this data I will compare and determine whether the project has been a success and if it has not been successful I will identify the loopholes of the project and devise solutions to cover these loopholes such that the project is made better next time I am implementing it again in the community.

The core technology that powers our solution will involve the following:

Questionnaires: I will prepare a questionnaire for them to collect information on how the droughts have affected the community members. The questionnaire will tackle social impacts, economic impacts and climate impacts. We will prepare these with the help of a survey toolkit called Survey Monkey to collect this information from the communities

Interviews: We will then interview the community with questions from the questionnaires and collect the data. Each interview will be recorded with the help of a high-definition camera. And with the help of video editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro to edit the videos and capture the key story points of how climate change has affected the community members.

Observation: I will also collect information through observation on how the droughts have affected the community.

We also plan to use water quantity measuring devices to determine how much water each household in a community can consume in a day to know the capacity of the storage water tanks we have to install in the community.

We plan to also use GPS location systems to capture the GPS location of the households that are most affected.

1. Board (2 members)
2. Working Group Managers (4 members)
3. Volunteers (49 members)

We have been working on this solution for 1 year and 2 months ( 14 months)

Our team is composed of 20 women and 25 men who are all coming from the eastern, central, western, and northern parts of Uganda.

Each task is distributed to the working group managers who effectively know and choose their volunteers based on capacity, inclusivity, and gender balance. We distribute our work equally and ensure that no one is overwhelmed with any work. 

We also have a rule that in case one feels overwhelmed by the work or conflicted in some way they fill in a feedback form which is directed to the board and the board can handle the issue effectively without harming anyones feelings and rights.

We value our population depending on the age bracket and gender statistics of the community. If the community has many young people, we use an approach that favors the young people to deliver our services. The same applies if the population has many women, men or has a balance of all.

We usually provide the population with climate education services, tree planting, and empowerment workshops.

We bring money into our fund through grants and community contributions. All these pass through a fiscal host NGO called climate 2025 that helps us manage the finances and ensure transparency in handling the funds.