Christine Butegwa

Christine Butegwa is a feminist, writer, entrepreneur, and gender and development activist based in Uganda. She is the author of the book titled, "The Mighty Angwech and More: Female Legends from Ugandan folklore". Christine is an interior designer and was the director of Rukundo Design Décor. In 2002, she co-produced a video, "A Tale of Ten Years: The Experience of Women and Gender Studies, Makerere University with Murerwa Rian".She is currently the founder and CEO of Jabali Consulting Ltd, a pan African gender and development consulting firm based in Kampala, Uganda. She is also on the Board of Directors for Art+Feminism. Quotes Central to our success is keeping and building new feminist autonomous spaces. I live in Kampala where I work with Akina Mama wa Afrika (AMwA). AMwA is a pan-African international women’s non-governmental organisation, which builds the leadership capacities of young African women to influence policies and decision-making spaces. As the Africa Regional Coordinator, I coordinate the African Women’s Leadership Institute, lobbying and advocating at the national, regional and international level, promoting feminist epistemology in Africa, networking and feminist movement building. I am a feminist because I am against all forms of patriarchy that oppress women. My mission is to contribute to the dismantling of patriarchy in both my personal and professional life. Although I have fought for women’s rights as far back as I can remember, AMwA and its African Women’s Leadership Institute (AWLI) was the space where I completely embraced my identity and ideology as a young African feminist. I am a proud AWLI alumni. My personal journey as a feminist has also been shaped by not just the spaces I have occupied, but by my mother, friends, and colleagues who have been my role models, mentors and provided the social networks that I lean on to inspire and push me forward. I believe in continuous learning and practicing feminist values and not just talking or rhetoric. I also believe in transferring skills and knowledge, mentoring and building a younger generation of feminists needed to own and sustain the gains of the women’s movement in the midst of challenges. The women’s movement has made important gains across the continent over the past 30 years. However today we are seeing growing political, social and cultural threats to this progress. There is a backlash of religious, cultural and other forms of fundamentalisms that have also penetrated the women’s movement. We are seeing the erosion and shrinking of autonomous spaces for feminists. All of this can be overcome. We need to keep investing in building feminist leadership, including through mentoring young African women. The battle with patriarchy continues, in my own personal life and in the lives of my fellow activists, in particular around challenging religious and cultural fundamentalisms. We also need to keep growing and promoting feminist epistemology and the body of feminist knowledge. Central to our success is keeping and building new feminist autonomous spaces that enable feminists to analyse, mobilise, rejuvenate and strategise for action. There are many African women who have dedicated their lives to make the world a better place for girls and women. I am proud to join them in defence of women’s rights. I want both my daughter and son to inherit a world where women and men live in equality, peace and justice. Butegwa says for the rural women, there is still little to celebrate given the high maternal mortality rates due to the poor healthcare system. She says there has been marked progress in women accessing leadership positions, but these still have to be assessed in terms of their ability to make substantive changes and inputs that will benefit women. She says the women activist should also focus lobbying banks to put in place women-friendly policies on accesing financial credit. She is also concerned that women who dominate the informal sector have not been adequately targeted by government in terms of incentives needed to empower them financially. These were some of the main questions guiding the discussions at a regional workshop organized by UNIDIR in Entebbe, Uganda. Drawing on the expertise and experience of diplomats, military officers, civil society practitioners, and academics, this report offers ideas to promote gender perspectives in arms control, as well as to improve women’s participation in international security. This is just one of the cases that the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) has received from Sudan. Since the unfolding of the conflict in Darfur in February 2003, intolerable crimes against humanity have been committed in a massive and systematic manner. Over two million people have been forced to flee their homes and over 70,000 people have been killed as a direct result of violence. Women and children have been the main target of these atrocities, specifically sexual and gender-based violence. Women and girls are vulnerable to rape whenever they venture out of the IDP camps in search of water or firewood. Despite the fact that in many cases, the survivors of gender-based violence can identify their attackers, justice has been denied. Now, the recent decision by the United Nations Security Council to refer the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court (ICC) may offer the only hope for many women and girls in Darfur to see justice done. Sexual and gender based violence is one of the biggest violations of women’s rights in Darfur. Women’s rights continue to be violated due to gender-based discrimination in the national laws of Sudan. According to Jane Lindrio Alao, a psychologist with the Amel Centre for Treatment and Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture based in Darfur, rape is not recognized as a crime in the law. Most people accused of rape are only charged with having committed assault, which is a lesser charge that can lead to a one year jail sentence. Under the law, rape can only be said to have occurred and admitted in court if there are 4 witnesses. “All the witnesses should witness the actual penetration. This means that if there were only 2 witnesses, the accused would not be charged. The ICC is the first permanent, independent court capable of investigating and bringing to justice individuals who commit the most serious violations of international humanitarian law, namely war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The Court has its seat in The Hague, in the Netherlands and was established in accordance with the Rome Statute on 1 July 2002. The ICC website indicates that by May 2005, 99 countries had ratified the Rome Statute, out of which 27 are African States. Africa since independence has been faced with armed conflict in almost all the fifty-three countries. And in that situation, women have endured the worst of that armed conflict in their communities… Moreover, this sexual violence happens both in conflict and peacetime. In fact, conflict only increases the problem but actually, the root cause is that women's sexuality has been taken as a site for power struggles between men and women. In an interview Akina Mama Wa Afrika, as you know, is a pan-African women’s organization. Our main niche is building womens leadership skills. So we are bringing together partners who work around sexual and gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive rights to look at ways in which we can build women's leadership to take control and change the situation of women in this continent. We can look at three key areas that we want to address. One is the fact that we have done a lot as a women’s movement in Africa and across the world to bring the issue of gender- based violence to the attention of policy makers. We have seen this with the United Nations women’s decade. We want to move from policies to ensuring these policies are implemented and to ensuring that governments set budgets to implement the policies on gender-based violence. We are seeing African governments saying, "We are not able to address the problem because we do not know the magnitude of it, we don’t have the statistics." Therefore, what we want to do is to empower women to gather documentation and statistics around women's lived experiences of gender-based violence whether in conflict or peace times. We can then use that to advocate for better policies and better implementation of those policies. In an interview We are saying there is an imbalance that our governments are giving to women’s issues. And let me give you a concrete example. Recently there has been a lot of talks around male circumcision as an alternative preventive measure against HIV/AIDS and our governments are taking that up and are going to put aside the money to have free male circumcision across the country. External links Category:Africa Category:Living people