Location: Uganda

Key(s): Economic Empowerment, Education

Rwenzori United Group for Life Improvement (RUGLI) works to empower women, raise awareness around HIV/AIDS, provide support to disabled, and elderly people and equip vulnerable community members with opportunities to improve their livelihoods. For this project, RUGLI will provide useful vocational skills and entrepreneurial training to women, including disabled women and young mothers, so that they can support themselves and their families. The organization identified weaving shoulder bags as an in-demand skill that they could train large groups of women to do in order to start their own businesses.

Many women in the area are unable to support their basic needs, and have come to RUGLI for help. Some have explained that their children are only eating one meal per day and don’t have enough clothes, nor do they have money for school fees. Other women have been forced into prostitution to provide for themselves and are desperate to earn an income on their own terms. One woman called this training her “light at the end of the tunnel.”

RUGLI envisions a world in which women are not reliant on relatives or spouses to take care of them financially. They know that once equipped with the right skills, these women can operate their own businesses and gain control over their lives. The organization has employed a number of community based trainers who will teach bag weaving skills during the training and can continue to check in on the participants afterward, as they are based in the same community. 

This project is ongoing, and will be shaped largely by the goals and needs of the participants. Since all trainers and participants live relatively close to each other, they will continue to weave bags together, and can decide if they want to create individual businesses or form a collective. RUGLI hopes to train additional cohorts of women in these useful skills as well. For many of the women, this is the first formal education they have received, and this skill has the potential to bring them independence and economic stability. 

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