Transforming Care After Conflict: How gendered care relations are being redefined in northern Uganda

Overview

Northern Uganda has suffered from chronic food shortages and high levels of poverty, political insecurity and adverse environmental conditions. Women can be particularly disadvantaged, constrained by a lack of access to and control over resources, patriarchal exploitation, and harmful social norms. Oxfam implemented a series of interventions in Karamoja to support women’s livelihoods and promote their socio-economic empowerment and rights. One of these was the Piloting Gender Sensitive Livelihoods in Karamoja (PGSLK) project.

This report assesses two evaluations of the project: a quantitative impact evaluation, which found that its economic empowerment activities in Kotido had a positive impact for women overall; and a qualitative follow-up study designed to dig deeper into the findings about care work as part of Oxfam’s Women’s Economic Empowerment and Care initiative (WE-Care). This report discusses the implications of its results for addressing care in women’s empowerment (particularly in post-conflict settings in Uganda and beyond), and reflects critically on the process of the evaluation itself and how it might be improved.