Country/region: Uganda, East Africa
Conflict: Social conflict, structural violence
Organisation: Mentoring and Empowerment Programme for Young Women (MEMPROW)
Field of work: Empowerment of girls and young women, building their confidence, leadership, agency, and peer-peer groups, promotion of women’s rights, climate justice and violence-free communities
The Mentoring and Empowerment Programme for Young Women (MEMPROW) is a national feminist organisation that was set up in 2008. We power adolescent girls and young women to their aspirations, strengthen their voice, and exercise more choice. We seek to build a bold young-centric feminist movement that redefines the dominant narrative, provides thought leadership on women’s consciousness, fosters multigenerational activism and catalyses societal transformation through dismantling patriarchy.
We work towards ensuring Feminist consciousness raising so that girls and women:
● Can identify violence and its implications
● Can participate in ending violence in any form
● Stop justifying violence and extend the same principles to their peers, boys and men.
We work towards having individuals, families and communities that adequately Prevent, identify, and respond to Sexual Gender Based Violence.
Our methodology: The Community is the manual – Through story-telling, experiential learning, learning exchange, safe space engagements, self-evaluations from a human rights lens.
Context. In Uganda girls and young women face societal constraints, internalized subordination, discrimination and exclusion and lack of control over key aspects of their lives and bodies. The disadvantages and inequality that girls and young women experience are rooted in unequal gender relations of power that are deeply ingrained in society and are symbolised, reproduced and perpetuated at family and community level, within learning institutions and in policy. In many instances, these violations of rights are magnified and multiplied by poverty.