WOMEN ARISES ASSOCIATION (WAA)
Women Arises Association (WAA) is a local community based, non-profit, autonomous, non-government organization located in Wakiso sub-county, Wakiso district in central Uganda
The founding of WAA in 2015 was after realizing that girls and women from the greatest percentage of the community affected by poverty, human right violation, poor health care and ignorance. The need for a bigger and louder voice for the community was a major concern among the grass root communities
WAA was formed to fight for women’s rights, economic emancipation and dignity, thereby improving their living standards by providing appropriate technologies, training and support services for self-reliance
​
MISSION
To empower women through capacity building, research, advocacy and service provision to achieve social justice, economic stability, and management of their environment transform their livelihood in a sustainable environment.
​
OUR VISION
Empowering women and they become self-reliant/dependent community, living quality and dignified lives in peaceful co-existence.
ACTIVITIES
ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT
This program aims at having a savings and loans methodology that focuses on building the capacity of people fighting poverty through best practices of simplicity and transparency during operations. This is a community self managed system of the purest form of financial inter-mediation that has a component of livelihood support.
WAA supports women and youth to start up micro income generating activities like profitable agribusiness ventures including: mushroom growing, piggery, goats rearing, vegetables, fruits and sustainable businesses like soap processing and handcraft making among others.
WAA does this through entrepreneurship and business skills training and educating the women and youth to shift from subsistence agriculture to medium scale farming where they can have enough yields for household consumption and sell off the surplus to earn an income.
This has helped increase our farmers’ household incomes which has enabled them to send their children to school and access better health services
AGRICULTURE
Food security and Nutrition
Agriculture is the main activity of the total production in Wakiso District. Most food got from agriculture is used for home consumption like 88% while the remaining 12% is for sale. It remains however, a region with a poor rural population with the majority living below the poverty line. The majority of the households have a cash income of less than $1. About 88% of the economically active population has no formal employment.
​
WAA’s food security program supports the targeted rural communities with various agronomic training practices, improved cereal and legume seeds, animals, high value crops like green vegetables, mushrooms, fruits apples, paw paws and avocado to ensure high yields for increased household food and nutrition security. This improves health among the communities due to reduction in nutrition related diseases like kwashiorkor.
​
EDUCATION
Education is the best tool to lay a solid foundation for a Nation’s growth and development for the good of mankind. Education is also the tool to eradicate illiteracy and impart knowledge including the development of skills. It is also a known fact that human resourcefulness, which is the bedrock of development, meaningful and purposeful living, can only be attained through education. Therefore WAA gives support to basic primary school education as a base needed to enhance human and economic emancipation.
In the Uganda there is still a big percentage of the population with low levels of literacy. Therefore the Adult literacy programs are aimed at imparting upon the poor people – youth and adults, especially women with literacy and numeracy skills that will effectively help them to participate in the economic, social-cultural and political transformation so as to reduce poverty. Adult literacy program targets women and girls, persons with disabilities, the elderly, hard to reach people and others in the rural areas, coupled with this, WAA implements the education whose goal is to substantially reduce the level of illiteracy particularly at the grass root level. While the primary aim of education is to fill the literacy gap in our society, a secondary result is to enhance development in society by creating greater political awareness, reducing poverty through self-reliance programs and improving the health and social status of individuals.
COMMUNITY HEALTH
The community Health Program is designed to promote Basic Health Care and provide information, advice, training and a referral service such as malaria, HIV/AIDS, maternal and reproductive health. Special attention will be on programs aimed at reducing child mortality and improving maternal health WAA will mount a mobile community health program on health issues especially in the areas which are undeserved more especially in rural areas and the fishing villages.
WATER AND SANITATION
WAA enhances the water sector financial and management capacity in the provision of water, sanitation and environmental services in order to provide effective and sustainable services towards the alleviation of poverty and the raising of living standards of the people, focusing especially the low-income population.
