Kitgum, Uganda 31 Jul 2007 - Next month, a highly successful International Rescue Committee program that provided psychosocial rehabilitation, conflict resolution and HIV/AIDS services to war victims in Uganda will close after five years. The Community Resilience and Dialogue program brought together five international NGOs, headed by the IRC, in a unique endeavor to rebuild 16 war-affected districts in Northern Uganda.
Among its achievements, the program provided HIV/AIDS counseling and testing to nearly 90,000 people, involved 120,000 community members in a dialogue and mobilization on psychosocial and protection issues, and reunited close to 6,500 formerly abducted children, adult returnees and orphans with their families. The program also provided education to war victims, sponsored peace clubs in schools, facilitated mediation and promoted economic development.
The program was carried out in partnership with the Ugandan government and local NGOs. One partner, AIDS Care, Education, & Training (ACET), initiated 35 “savings and loan associations” in five camps for displaced people, with the help of the IRC. A 38-year-old
HIV-positive widow and mother of six living in the Amida displaced persons camp, was able to save 178,000 Ugandan shillings (over US $100). She used the money to buy a pig, pay her son’s school fees and reinvest in her own business.
“Her participation in the savings and loan association enabled her to get money that she would never have accumulated as a result of her business or any other work,” says Beatrice Adong of ACET. “She is now able to buy nutritious food that makes it easier for her to cope with the anti-retroviral treatment.”
In the northern town of Kitgum, Kavine Anek, the psychosocial program officer for another partner, the Kitgum Concerned Women’s Association(KICWA), says that the program made her discover the importance of play in psychosocial support for formerly abducted children.
“Play has allowed the war-affected children to learn and cope with their hard life in the displaced camps and express their emotions and experiences,” Kavine Anek says.
The program has assisted people in conflict-affected communities across the country—from people displaced by the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army in Acholiland and refugees from southern Sudan, to communities attacked in 1996 by the anti-government Allied Democratic Forces and those in northeastern Uganda’s volatile Karamoja region.
