The 2022 Capstone report for Global Livingston Institute focuses on the agricultural project implemented in Lira, Uganda. The project started in 2017, with the goal of teaching best agricultural practices to Lira farmers, most of whom are war-affected persons, as well as the adults in the region who were abducted as children.
Yamna Rashid MPA '22
Ronnie Schinker MPA '22
Faculty Advisor Laurie Miller
Executive Summary →
Northern Uganda has a long history of instability, with the Lord's Resistance Army having abducted tens of thousands of children. Those children, now adults, were left to reintegrate back into society without the lived experience of learning from their families as they grew up, and many thus had insufficient knowledge of how to survive or earn a livelihood.
With this and other projects, GLI hoped to provide war-affected persons with the opportunity to obtain a skill to sustain their livelihood L and to simultaneously incorporate mental health counseling into trainings to address issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder, abuse, and depression.
This report details the 2022 Capstone Team's work to carry out thorough research to map out a timeline of the project, assess GLI's work in Lira, study the initial goals and objectives of the program, and provide recommendations as to GLI's next step in the country with respect to new projects or programs.
This literature review aims to provide the history behind the term "former child soldiers", non-profit organization projects in Uganda, and the creation of GLI's current agricultural project in Lira, Uganda. Through learning best evaluation practices in East-African settings, challenges non-profit organizations face in developing countries, and the development of colonized societies, this section will identify how recommendations can be formulated for future programs, how the ongoing projects can be facilitated, and the drawbacks of the limitations in current research done on Uganda.
Collectively, the project report aims to answer the following main research question:
Through critically analyzing GLI's work with Ugandans who had been abducted as children in Lira, UG, what can we find to celebrate and learn from in order to facilitate collective reflection, formulate recommendations, and arrive at potentially better strategies for future work?
In the 1990s, much of the Global North held Uganda up as an example of a country making what appeared to be a considerable positive change in terms of poverty reduction (King, 2015). However, that was in the early years of the presidency of Yoweri Museveni, who first took that position in 1986 and has remained president to this c (King, 2015). Since that time, Museveni has come to be understood as a semi-authoritarian ruler under whom much funding is given to Uganda's military and much less attention is given to everyday citizens, resulting in a concerning level of rising inequality (King 2015). Foreign investors have taken note of the state of Uganda's government and have increasingly directed their funds to › NGOs to maintain their influence in the country while having reduced contact with the government (Dicklitch 1998).
