Make Way Uganda
.Uganda is a country in the East African region’s equatorial part. With a population of 40 million people, Uganda also has the second youngest population in the world, with the average age of Ugandans being 15.8 years (UBOS 2016).
While Uganda has made some significant progress in the area of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR), for instance, being able to put up a successful campaign that lowered the prevalence of HIV that ravaged the country from the early 80s until the late 90s, reducing the rate of female genital mutilation and child marriages, the country still experiences some challenges around access to SRHR.
Factors like education, wealth, location, and region in the country play a significant role in determining access to health. The 2016 Uganda Demographic Health Survey report highlighted that women in rural areas, women with no education, and women with low income are less likely to seek critical health care than their urban-dwelling, educated, and wealthier counterparts. According to UBOS, monetary poverty currently stands at 21%, yet 38% of health expenditure is out-of-pocket. Bearing in mind that while the government policy is that health care accessed through the public wings in government hospitals is free, structural challenges like frequent drug stock-outs, corruption, and underpaid and overwhelmed medical staff will often charge fees for otherwise free services. The brunt of these challenges is often borne by the end-user–service seekers and determines whether individuals from low-resource settings access quality care.
To address these challenges, Make Way offers the following solutions:
First, it seeks to promote the adoption and use of an innovative intersectional feminist approach to SRHR that enables people who are historically marginalized, like women, girls, LGBTQI people, youth, people from low-income communities and people living with disabilities, to have their needs accounted for in planning, budgeting and service delivery processes. The Make Way programme seeks to do this by building marginalised communities’ lobbying and advocacy capacity and ensuring they have representatives in decision-making processes.
The second is strengthening the capacity of Civil Society Organizations to advocate and lobby for the change they want to see in their communities and amongst local, national, regional, and global decision-makers.
The third is to demand that duty-bearers at (sub)national, regional and global levels formulate and implement strategies, policies, and plans with an intersectional lens that leads to quality SRHR services being available, accessible and acceptable for all.
In order to ensure that intersectional practices are part of the present and the future, the Make Way programme has built a partnership with the Ugandan youth by establishing the Makeway youth panel which stands as an advisory structure throughout the duration of the programme, to interact and operate within the Makeway programme. The panel consists of three youth members selected to represent youth and amplify their voice throughout the implementation and evaluation of the programme.
One of the roles of a youth panel is to participate and contribute to decisions in the following meetings representing youth, especially those with compounded vulnerabilities and advocating for their priorities and effective responses through the Makeway programme.
The other role is to generate and propose new ideas and concepts based on engagement with their communities, network, and other youth-led platforms, to be reviewed and included when relevant in the programme planning/monitoring activities.
