CivilSocietyTA working with INGO and CSO learning from running a charitable health clinic in Uganda

List the things you know about plastic: • It is made from fossil fuels (oil) and so each new bag is from a finite resource • Governments encourage us to use fewer bags – some ban their importation • Shops help us change our habits by charging us for thin bags • Cheap, thin bags break and go in the bin • Things you put in the bin are burnt or buried – both are bad for the environment • Drop a bag on the ground and it blocks a drain or chokes an animal Remember what a responsible person should do? It is ‘Green’ and saves you money: Reduce the use of resources that are finite Re-use items, find a second or third job for things you own Recycle, efficiently, what can’t be re-used anymore Kinawataka Women’s Initiative is based in a village that has become a suburb of Kampala, in Uganda. As well as thin plastic bags blocking the drains - that are so necessary in fertile Uganda with two rainy seasons – the women found plastic drinking straws that had been used for locally made juices in a bag...

Helping People, Helping the Planet "At least I have my health” – a joke said for hard times in the US and Europe. In Uganda health is not so much a personal description of well-being but a day to day concern that requires nutrition, the time to visit the over-crowded and under-resourced government facility, or money to visit a non-government clinic. For women living in the Kinawataka village in Kampala, Benedicta Nabingi saw her retirement from over 20 years of public sector work as the start of her challenges. Benedicta and other retirees have looked at their households and watched the large houses being built around them, the city’s roads getting busier and new shopping centres built; covered with adverts for designer clothes, mobile phone companies and new types of soda drink. Around the village the green hills of Kampala are testimony to the rains that allow the countryside to feed a rapidly growing population – but in the urban areas the ‘shambas’ for growing food are being t...

http://www.volunteerabroad.com/listingsp3.cfm/listing/69114 Description: Hope Clinic Lukuli and Kinawataka Women's Initiative have formed a partnership to expand the number of women and households who can prepare and weave waste plastic drinking straws into lengths of 'material'. This material is then used to make mats and shopping/ sports bags to replace disposable plastic bags. All sale proceeds from the products are paid to the weavers/ bag makers. The volunteer post is to 'make this happen'. Support the marketing, liase with customers, help the women organise into production and finishing teams and create links to buyers in Europe and North America Highlights: - Living in Kampala, a friendly city in East Africa - Helping women in households on low income to generate their own earnings for food and education - Reducing waste that pollutes water sources and block rain drains (that otherwise lead to floods) - Supporting a philanthropic health centre to ...

Joyce Bbosa is an experienced midwife who described at her retirement how she has delivered the village with her own two hands. Joyce, then in her 50s, was working in a two room structure helping children with fevers – whether malaria or not – and helping scared young mothers living in Kampala away from their family support, at home in the village. Hope Clinic Lukuli grew from these two rooms by the work of a women-led committee of non-medics. Small actions by the people living in Lukuli village on the edge of Kampala brought child immunisation to the families; help with oral rehydration to manage the fevers; and access to HIV testing for the pregnant mothers and others to help reduce new infections. www.hcluganda.org Hope Clinic Lukuli has continued since 2000, and despite Joyce’s retirement in 2004, to become a new facility offering family planning and maternal health, admissions for deliveries, a laboratory and out-patients department. What makes it unusual is that the co...