Tukundane Charity Organization

A generation of women and young women living Free of HIV/AIDS stigma,

socially and economically empowered.

2019 Brief Annual Report

Website: www.tukundane.org
Twitter: @Tukundane20
Instagram: tukundaneorg

Prepared by Phiona Kusingura, Fiona Nalwoga & Michael Ssemakula

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Table of Contents
No Item under focus Page No
1.0 Message from our Institutional Founders 3
2.1 About Tukundane Charity Organization 4
2.2 Our Journey so far in Women Empowerment 4
2.3 From our community motivation and remarkable testimonies 4-5
2.4 Our empowerment programs and campaigns 5
3.0 Our Impact to breaking acute poverty 5-6
3.1 Strategies used 6
3.1.1 Strategy one: Community trainings and testimonies 6-7
3.1.2 Strategy two: HIV/AIDS and other diseases’ sensitization, 7
fighting stigma and Community awareness on GBV.
3.1.3 How impactful the organization was to vulnerable communities 8
last year?
3.1.4 This the solidarity and happiness we bring to our communities. 8
4.0 Fundraising strategy 8
5.0 Our partners 9

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1. Message from our Institutional Founders
“As the Institution’s Leaders, we are pleased to
present the 2019 Annual Report for Tukundane
Charity Organization (TCO). TCO enjoyed another
successful year of addressing challenges faced by
single mothers/women living with HIV/AIDS, young
girls, sex workers and vulnerable women in fishing
communities, and provide appropriate interventions
Phiona Kusingura Fiona Nalwoga
Executive Director Co-founder to transform their lives in Uganda. We profoundly
express most sincere gratitude to our partners (Green
Elephant Foundation and Soulforce) for your commitment and support in their sharing of
knowledge and resources with TCO –aimed at the continuous development of the organization
(both in-kind and financial support) and our volunteers (in their diverse capacities), and
communities that have given us support and audience through identifying most vulnerable
women in vulnerable settings that can be assisted by TCO. You have absolutely made it
possible for us to address challenges faced by women in susceptible contexts.
In a bid to express TCO’s transparency, the report provides highlights from 2019 and
engagements with different community groups and stake holders.
2019 was a super amazing and productive year for TCO in Uganda, an activity compact year
with many positive changes in the mix and opportunities for work through collaborations at
community level.
In 2019, TCO continued to elevate the status of women –this encompassed social and
economic empowerment through projects such as charcoal lighters’ training project,
tailoring/sowing project, mental health through psychosocial support and awareness on
Gender Based Violence (GBV) –enhanced through education on human rights to fight HIIV
stigma, which directly feeds into our organization mission “to be a safe charity space where
communities of young women and women living with HIV are supported to tackle everyday
barriers to living a full life economically empowered, socially supported and positively
contributing to community development”.
Through thought-provoking sessions we challenged deep rooted Christian Supremacy and
spiritual reclamation for LGBTQI people –which demonizes them and partly act as a ground
for perpetuating extreme homophobia.
Despite the numerous challenges in the operation, TCO through its strategic programmes: 1)
campaigns, strategic-partnerships and networking and 2) Community empowerment has
managed to promote the well-being of women and their fundamental entitlements in
Uganda.”

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2.1. About Tukundane Charity Organization
We are an independent non-beneficial organization that promotes awareness on the daily
challenges faced by single mothers/women living with HIV/AIDS, young girls, sex workers and
vulnerable women in fishing communities, and provide appropriate interventions to
transform their lives in Uganda.
Women’s social, economic and health being is one of the most underlying essential areas of
focus that Tukundane Charity Organization has profoundly put emphasis on to improve the
economic and health status of underprivileged women. Our journey so far has encircled
mechanisms that strengthen women’s capacities to earn a living and improve their health as
a tandem to deliver on our national and global health goals such as Universal Health Coverage
goal and Sustainable development Goal (SDG#5) –“achieve gender equality and empower all
women and girls”, and other health related SDGs .
In 2017, Tukundane started improving the quality of life of the vulnerable and underprivileged
Women and their families in low resource settings through a set of core programmes that
include; (1) campaigns, strategic-partnerships and networking to strengthen our advocacy on
combating violence against women and Gender based violence that may undermine good
health outcomes, (2) Community empowerment through social and economic empowerment
which has encircled capacity building interventions for women to set up affordable and
profitable businesses such as making charcoal lighters, tailoring businesses and others, and
(3) Knowledge management program, where we work on various research/field analyses (to
ease our evidence based advocacy and impact based interventions) through our community
engagements and experiences shared by targeted population.
2.2. Our Journey so far in Women Empowerment
The social, economic and health being of women is a core area of focus central to our work
at Tukundane Charity Organization. Our journey so far has enwrapped interventions that
strengthen women’s capabilities to earn a living and improve their health, social and
economic life spheres to end extreme poverty.
At Tukundane we prioritize and strongly align our interventions with approaches aimed at
elevating the status of women for an equitable power walk or a fair access to resources in
society.

2.3. From our community motivation and remarkable testimonies see here, in all the
projects we implement, we sensitize women to know their roles, and responsibilities in
society as rights holders. This is a strong advocacy tool by which we attest to the fact that
respect for the underprivileged women’s and young women’s fundamental entitlements
gives them space to ably participate in the social and economic functions of their
communities. Strong sustainable and inclusive development cannot be achieved without
addressing the obstacles to women’s wellbeing like power imbalance relations, discriminative
interventions and barriers that limit women’s participation in the community and national
economic development priorities. This is a dream Tukundane is bringing close from a far to
harness better wellbeing of single mothers living with HIV/AIDS, young women, vulnerable
women living in fishing communities and sex workers who have been deprived of adequate
resources, services and health accessibility. Our interventions aim to restore the dignity of a
vulnerable woman in society and strengthen their income generating capacities.

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2.4. Our empowerment programs and campaigns have not only equipped women with
livelihood knowledge but also inevitably acted as a robust enabling mechanism for women to
set up their own small scale businesses in making charcoal lighters and tailoring/sowing
businesses as a source of their livelihood –which has enhanced decent living for them and
their families, this is straightforwardly in-line with SDG #1 on “ending poverty in all its forms
and everywhere” and “the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living” enshrined in
Article #11 of the United Nations, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights, and Article #25 of the UN 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We firmly
agree that this is a leeway to break gendered economic power imbalances in development
that underpin and reinforce poor indicators of Human, and Gender Development Index
reflected by poor standards of living, poor health, poor nutrition and poor education. We
unwaveringly aim to address this through our organization objective of “empowerment/skills
development” link here, which purpose to steadfastly redeem women’s welfare as a
fundamental boardwalk in achieving fundamental health, economic, and social objectives
within their families and communities in which they are born, live, work and age.

3.0. Our Impact to breaking acute poverty

We have discovered through our ongoing projects that fully engaged, educated, healthy and
productive women can help break multi-generational poverty, they are resilient in the face of
personal and societal threats and, as skilled and informed citizens. We are sturdily confident
that our community out reaches and empowerment programs will continually contribute to
effective strengthening of women in communities and Uganda at large to attain the Vision
2040 in the National Development Plan of moving Uganda to an upper middle income status.

Our projects mainly rotted around economic and social empowerment under our community
empowerment program. Women’s social, economic and health being is one of the most
underlying essential areas of focus that Tukundane Charity Organization has profoundly put
emphasis on to improve the economic and health status of vulnerable women in Uganda.
This is a strong impact based instrument by which we testify to the fact that putting into focus
the underprivileged women’s fundamental rights gives them opportunity to fully maximize
their abilities to participate in the social and economic faculties of their contexts they reside.

Volunteers with trainers on making charcoal lighters

We completed the first of our innovative training for the Tukundane women. In our mission
to come up with ideas to train the women in low capital needed businesses to try and increase
their sustainable incomes we came up with making charcoal lighters for the women.

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Making charcoal lighters is a short and easy process that the ladies can themselves start to do
on their own once the training completed. We hired a trainer that went through the process
step by step for the Tukundane ladies showing them the process, equipment, materials that
are used to make the complete product.

This is enhanced through our care model which involves four major steps that is –
Identification, Engagement, Sustatinability, Exit/Referral of the people under our care.

3.1. Strategies used:

To enhance economic empowerment, we used the following strategies;

3.1.1. Strategy one: Community trainings,

We held Charcoal Lighters training project; here we started working in partnership with Green
Elephant Foundation. We came up with an idea of creating coal that was both cheap to
manufacture and also environmentally friendly to adhere to Sustainable development goal
#7 on “affordable and clean energy”. After sitting down with the women and discussing how
feasible the charcoal lighters project would be for them as an organisation, with all in
agreement, we set a number of workshops that the members attended so they would all be
able to make the charcoal lighters.

Training days were organised with the women and their families. As the women trained, the
children were provided with entertainment, food and refreshments. The training days were
events for the whole women so that no one had to miss out.

The training took a number days, at first we had to bring in a professional trainer to
train/equip the ladies with different ways on how they could produce the charcoal lighters,
On the fourth day the women were able to mix ingredients and eventually produce different
shapes pf charcoal lighters. We held seminars to educate the women on the importance of
clean energy and keeping the environment clean as a way of bring awareness to the society
as to why the Tukundane charcoal lighters were ideal use to light charcoal stoves since they
are clean and better for the environment than what the average household currently uses.

Later the tukundane women/young girls had different seminars on how to package the
finished product which they managed and had the Tukundane charcoal lighters packed and
ready for the market.

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The training went on for six months so as for the women to keep engaging and perfecting the
production of the charcoal lighters, to be able to market and sell the product to local and
eventually internal buyers.

3.1.2. Strategy two:

HIV/AIDS and other diseases’ sensitization, fighting stigma and Community awareness on
GBV.
We continuously hold counselling and psychosocial support sessions for the Tukundane
members. We held an outreach on Violence against Women/Gender Based Violence
awareness, HIV testing, counselling and Referrals, understanding HIV stigma, and
sensitization on fundamental human entitlements as a gender transformative approach.

We gather to create a safe free space where the women can openly discuss any concerns,
issues or problems that they are facing. This can be within the family surroundings, mental
issues, any domestic violence or personal issues with their health or circumstances. Coming
together in a group allows the women to know that they are not alone and not the only ones
facing these problems. Advice from the other members, one to one sessions or just listening
often goes a long way. With the help of our well-wishers and partners like Green Elephant
Foundation, we were able to provide the women with basic needs and other donations that
came from different platforms to support the Tukundane women/young girls. We offer
emergency and periodic solutions where possible.

Inspiring stories from our communities

Early on within our work we came across Justine ………….. story. Through social media we were
able to trace Justine. When we met Justine, she was 26 years of age with a one week baby
both HIV positive. Because Justine was so poor with no help, she couldn’t afford to pay for a
hospital when pregnant, she had to deliver the baby by herself in unsafe circumstances and
therefore the baby also contracted HIV in the process. Justine’s story touched us, she has no
way of supporting herself and her new born baby. Tukundane took Justine on and made it
mission to assist her in any way we could. We highlighted Justine’s story through social media
and tried to reach as many people as possible to get Justine some much needed help. As
Tukundane we provided her with financial help, helped her stabilise herself, Health-wise and
physically. An organisation was also able to come on board and help with her baby, as a
mother Justine made the difficult decision to allow the organisation to look after the baby as
Justine worked on getting herself back on her feet and become stable enough to care for
herself and the baby. After a number of months Justine regained her health and started

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charcoal business with few other things to sell like tomatoes etc, we kept in touch with her
and we eventually saw real improvement. Her story is one that proves that everyone needs
someone to lean on, we have been able to share her progress on Tukundane website and we
pleased to say she is getting better every day that passes. We don’t take all this for granted,
we thank each and every person that has supported Tukundane to be able to reach out in
anyway they can to help us support and make a change to the Tukundane women/young girls.

3.1.3. How impactful the organization was to vulnerable communities last year?
We make sure that after few months we have an outreach with the women/sometimes our
well-wishers/partners in kind assist us to make this possible, we would like to thank Green
Elephant Foundation who have continued to support us. They provided the women with clean
energy stoves to be able to use them for the charcoal lighter project and future use. This event
was also colourful it took us one day and the Tukundane women learnt more about clean
cooking and saving as a way to save and make some sort of income at the same time.

3.1.4. This the solidarity and happiness we bring to our communities.

We ended 2019 with Christmas party, whereby we had the Tukundane women/young girls
gather at Tukundane premises to celebrate the holidays and the amazing work each of us had
put in, This event was supported by Soulforce and Green Elephant Foundations.

We all know holidays can be a bit difficult for some people since Tukundane women are single
mothers the founders and our partners in kind wanted to put a smile on the women’s faces
by having a Christmas get together.
The members felt cared for and loved during the festival time since most of them had no
homes to go. Hence this get together was a blessing to many of them who were not expecting
anything from anyone.
This event has encouraged more members to seek out support and engagements that
encourage use of spiritual intervention in HIV care and adherence for young women.

4.0. Our fundraising strategy

Unpredictable funding is still a challenge to the institution. Our funding essentially came from
partners like Soulforce, and Green elephant foundation.
The organization embarked on a fundraising strategy through setting up a GoFundMe page,
we also started making T-Shirts and jumpers which we sell to our well-wishers to raise funds
to support our ongoing charity work in communities.

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5.0. Our partners
Thank you our partners for the support you have accorded us to make our work achievable
and impactful to the communities under our care.

Soulforce

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