Advocacy in Uganda: Improving markets

In southwest Uganda, the Kyanamira community had a poorly organised market, which was too small to support the community. Having such a market was limiting local families’ access to nutritious food and was having a serious impact on the local economy as traders were being restricted in what supplies they were able to bring into Kyanamira. These limitations were having far-reaching negative impacts on people’s lives in this community.

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This prompted the market vendors and Tearfund partner, Pentecostal Assemblies of God (PAG), to work together to find solutions. After the community completed the Church and Community Mobilisation (CCM) advocacy process with PAG, several initiatives were realised, and one of them was to establish a market to meet the needs of Kyanamira.

To do this, PAG wrote a letter to the sub-county council about the market suffering from poor community planning and needing more stalls, and asked for the council to help them increase the size of the market. The council discussed this during their meeting and decided to put small shops in the market to increase their size, in order to better serve the community. The decision of the sub-county council was then approved by the district council, which gave it the go-ahead.

Unfortunately, however, the sub-county council did not have the required budget to construct these small shops. So, to generate enough for these shops to be built, the council rented land to brickmakers. This provided enough funds from the rental income and enough bricks for the government to build shops for the Kyanamira market. As a result, there has been a double benefit, and the problem that the community identified has now been solved.

This short case study, on the theme of livelihoods, illustrated the impact of using the following advocacy approaches:

• Lobbying government officials

Case studies can be used alongside the Advocacy toolkit, giving practical examples of the approaches it sets out.