While CARE Uganda has a long history in the agriculture and natural resources governance sector, recent years have seen increased deliberate attention to addressing the effects of climate change by working both at the community level on effective adaptation strategies for small-holder farmers (with a focus on women) and at the national level on key policy issues. CARE Uganda puts particular attention on building communities’ capacity to adapt to climate change and strengthen their resilience with a deliberate nutrition-sensitive approach.

CARE Uganda has implemented many projects with climate-smart agriculture and resilience components in the last several years. These projects deliberately intended to improve household food and nutrition security. CARE Uganda is applying a nutrition-sensitive approach to all its program initiatives by paying attention to promoting crops with high nutritional value, livestock that are controlled by women and are rich in proteins (chickens both for meat and eggs), and a mixed intercropping system that will improve household dietary diversity as well as reduce the number of months of household hunger. Kitchen gardens and the promotion of vegetables have been central in most of these interventions. Through CARE’s Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) model, which forms the foundation of almost all livelihoods programming and is core to CARE’s financial inclusion work, key information on nutrition is also being passed to members. As women become more economically empowered through VSLAs and other leadership training and support and as men increasingly show power sharing and more caring attitudes to women, food utilization, climate resilience, and nutrition also improve.

CARE Uganda’s experience with communities has consistently confirms women and girls as among the most vulnerable to climate change. Evidence has shown that with equality between women and men, economies tend to grow faster, the poor are able to move out of poverty and the wellbeing of women, men and children is enhanced. On this basis CARE International in Uganda identified “poor and vulnerable women and girls (10-49 years) whose livelihoods are dependent on or are affected by degrading natural resources and/or protected areas” as the Impact Group for Women Empowerment in Natural Resource Governance (WENG). WENG seeks to improving livelihoods, change power relations and reduce gender-based violence in the home and community.