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...