Women Entrepreneurship and Innovation Initiative (WEII) Uganda CRM Project (2020)

Information contributed by Flora Tracy Ayee, CRM Teacher and Founder/Executive Director of the Women Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute (WEII) in Uganda

Communities in Uganda suffer greatly from the impacts of chronic stress caused by illness and disease (including malaria), Gender Based Violence (GBV), child-mothers, school dropouts, land conflict, and other issues. The Women Entrepreneurship and Innovation Initiative (WEII) Uganda Community Resiliency Model (CRM)® Project provides training in vital resiliency skills to combat the long-lasting psychological impacts of these traumatic issues.

The WEII CRM Project utilizes the Village Health Teams (VHT) program, a Uganda government structure comprised of men and women that are trained to act as the primary, community-level health contact for all villages. They relay basic health information to their neighbors and direct people to various levels of healthcare, selling UVP-subsidized mosquito nets, acting as Water Guard, and supplying condoms. However, they are not currently trained to handle the psychological impacts of trauma, which have become a leading health problem across communities. Providing VHTs with CRM training will bring critical resiliency skills into communities experiencing trauma.

The goals of this project are:

To create trauma-informed and resiliency-focused communities.
To reduce the death of women due to Gender Based Violence (GBV) in the community.
To help women strengthen their resilience.
To reduce the effects of trauma on the community.
To reduce the rate of school drop-out/early child marriages.
To equip women with CRM skills and empower them to make proper/well-informed decisions when they are in their best state of being.

Impact

CRM trainings in Uganda in 2018 saw positive results: one school-going student reported saving a friend from suicide through the use of CRM skills, three child-mothers facing a desire to abandon their children reported utilizing CRM skills to help them make informed decisions and utilize resources available to them, and five divorced women reported developing greater resilience and improved problem-solving techniques.

Project Plan

Two three-day CRM Skills Trainings for 80 VHTs (cost: $4,000 USD)
Follow-up monitoring and evaluation of VHTs for six months, during their training in the villages and after their training to assess the impact (cost: $1,000 USD)