E2 The changing faces of disasters in Uganda_Daniel Ortega and Simon Okello with Rumana Kabir_100823

Daniel Ortega and Simon Okello from Uganda have extensive experience in working in humanitarian response and development. They have both received scholarships to come to the UK to share their knowledge and learn more. Daniel has been working in the space of humanitarian response for over seven years, focusing on access to justice for refugees. Simon has worked in the humanitarian space for over eight years, providing emergency response to refugee influx and responding to climate-related disasters. Their motivations come from their personal experiences with conflict and its effects in Uganda. They have both started organizations to provide support and legal services to refugees and those affected by conflict. They are passionate about making a difference in the humanitarian response space. Welcome to my Mars Mantra Podcast. I'm your host, Rumana Kabir. In this podcast, we will share stories from changemakers working in disasters and development. Today, I'm speaking to Daniel Ortega and Simon Okello from Uganda. Both of them got scholarship because they have an extensive amount of experience and they both received scholarship to come to the UK to share their knowledge as well as learn more. I met them as my students and I've learned much more from them rather than me teaching as they have amazing amount of stories to tell. So to start with, would you like to introduce yourselves and what you've done before SENDIT? My name is Daniel Ortega. I'm a lawyer by profession. I'm currently doing my master's at Oxford Brookes at the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice. I have over seven years of experience working in the space of humanitarian response, particularly with refugees and especially regarding the fact that Uganda as a country is probably the biggest host of refugees within Africa and third in the world if I'm to go by the statistics of the UNHCR. This makes it a very important space in which we are operating within Uganda today. I'm glad that I have been a part of great work that the country has been doing in terms of providing refugees a safe space and protection for refugees. My particular area of focus has been access to justice for refugees, so I've been directly working in protection of their rights and ensuring that refugees, their rights are protected as much as any other citizen of a country would actually be protected. Thank you, Daniel. Simon, you want to go? I have worked in the humanitarian space for over eight years, providing humanitarian emergency response to refugee influx in Uganda and also responding to climate-related disasters in terms of providing assistance services and also building capacities of communities and local government structures to be able to build their resilience to climate change. I have worked with refugees first before I joined the UN. I worked for an organization called Medical Teams International, which is basically one of the biggest agencies that is providing refugee health in Uganda, working in all the refugee settlements. So that is where I started my, I would say, my career in emergency response in humanitarian work at a bigger scale. So I was in that space providing response to refugees who are coming in big numbers from the neighboring countries like South Sudan. I was part of the team that assisted in providing health and emergency response services to the 2013 influx in South Sudanese influx in the West Nile part of the country. So that is when I started my major work in refugee operation. That was a very good experience and I moved on to join the UN and I remained within the space of providing humanitarian response to crisis, but more particularly focused now on climate related disasters, providing response services, working with the local government to settle people that have been displaced in this context to temporary shelter. That is what I've been doing prior to my coming to the UK to join, to do my master's. So tell me about your motivations. Let's start from the basics. Personally, I have been exposed to conflict and the effects of conflict. Uganda as a country has a long history of armed conflict. Since we got independence to 1986, we had experienced, I think, almost no proper elections or democratic elections to actually move to change governments. So change of government was mostly by some form of conflict. The area, the region itself, East Africa and the Horn of Africa is also riddled with conflict. Somalia is our neighbor, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and even Rwanda and have all had their fair share of conflict in the past. Uganda was no exception and by the time I was a young person, the LRA war was actually rife in Uganda. What is LRA? So the LRA is Loads Resistance Army, which was led by Joseph Coyne. For over 20 years, they ravaged the northern part of Uganda with various abductions and it was really a very horrible time for a very big part of Uganda. And I just so happened to come from that particular part of the country. And what that meant is that much of my life as a child was that I had to spend it within the central or the central region of the country. So I was not able to safely go back to my home area and, let's say, live with the rest of my people. Whereas Uganda as a country is my people generally, but my particular tribe where we come from is the north and particular home village is the north. So I was unable to be there. And so what then, that showed to me that the ethics of conflict, I mean, we were displaced even within our own country. So I was always drawn to the fact that conflict causes displacement. And this indeed is manifesting today, like we said, with the number of refugees within Uganda from other countries. I thought that I always had this inner part of me telling me to be, in one way or another, use whatever opportunities I have been given, whatever privileges I had to be able to support those who are in unfortunate positions in that way. So as soon as I got done with law school in 2016, I started an organization called Center for Community Development and Peaceful Coexistence. In short, it's called SECODEP. It's quite a handful of a name, but it sounds like SENDEP. Yes, exactly. So I left law school and immediately embarked upon that. And our role was to provide, together with a few friends of mine, we provided access to justice services and legal services to refugees within the area. And also people that actually are non-Aboriginal who had experienced conflict for a very long time and were in the post-recovery period, during the recovery period. So how old were you when you started this? I was 24 when I started the organization. I took a leap of faith. And it actually reaped quite a big reward because we managed to gain a lot of traction within the space. Very difficult to actually get, first of all, to get recognition because of your age and working in the space, the lack of experience. One thing we had going for us was the fact that when it came to issues of the law, we were very informed with the law. So we were all lawyers, the three of us who started it. When it came to access to justice, we were very qualified to do that. Understanding the humanitarian space, though, was a bit more tricky because it needed some more experience within the space. But slowly we started to get there, understanding the space. Can you explain what is humanitarian space? What I mean by the humanitarian space, and specifically, if I can say maybe like for Uganda as a country, is that this is the space that is actually dealing with people who have suffered in one way or another a certain form of disaster, be it conflict, which is, I think, there's a saying, I know there's a discussion of all disasters are man-made, but conflict as well as also natural disasters, that particular space is not something that I was qualified in because as a lawyer, I knew the law. However, when it came to supporting people who have been affected by disasters in one way or another, that's what I consider the humanitarian space. My motivation came from there, and eventually organization grew, and we found ourselves on the National Refugee Protection Working Group of the United Nations within the UNHCR in Uganda. Yeah, I'm proud I took that step, and I'm proud it brought me to this space, this humanitarian response space that I am really hoping to have a bigger impact and be a changemaker in today and for the future. How exciting is that? You've achieved so much already. That's really wonderful. Simon, you want to tell us your motivation and how you started it all? I am one of those that indirectly felt the impact of this war in northern Uganda because a number of my family members, both those were close, distant family members, were in one way or the other affected physically, emotionally, and so on. I actually remember one of the relatives, close relatives, who had to vacate his home in the village to come and live in the city center, but he didn't have a house, he didn't have a home, he didn't have anywhere to live in. He had to look around for the relatives, including my parents who were living within the city center, so they had to find ways of having him hosted within the city center, which was not an easy thing because he came with his family and all these kind of things coming with it. So it was not an easy experience. By that time I was still a young person in school, but I would hear and understand and know what actually it means by war and what kind of effects it had on the communities especially people that, you know, loved ones that we were close to. My motivation when I was in school, I would see trucks of, you know, humanitarian agencies moving around in trucks, in convoys of vehicles, and you would hear about them, watch them on TV, and what you could see is actually them ferrying food items, supplies, and so on to go and distribute to people who are living in camps, in IDPs. What is IDP? Internally Displaced Persons Camp. So many people actually were displaced into camps within the country due to this conflict. So it caused sort of an emergency situation like that needed urgent humanitarian attention that actually drew the world towards that part of the country in terms of resources needed to respond to these emergencies, people dying, people being displaced, and so on and so forth. So looking at all this as someone who is growing up, I felt like there's something that I could contribute in terms of responding to such similar emergencies or suffering of the people. So building on all these experiences, I felt like I think there is a contribution that I can make as a person to touch the lives of people who have gone through such disturbing situations. Immediately after school, I joined some agency, humanitarian agency, which was where I did my internship as a student then, and they did a lot of humanitarian response in the Greater Northern Uganda. They did a lot of child protection. Being part of the team that was trying to do all these kind of services, providing protection services to the people. Can you explain a bit more about child protection? What exactly did they do? In child protection, basically they were looking at keeping children in school, and in addition to creating friendly spaces for children where their rights are protected, and where they are protected from being abused, basically. That is what they were doing at community level. So building capacities of local community structures to be able to monitor children within the community so that they are not abused. So being part of all this, really, I found myself within this space of working with people that are being disturbed, being displaced, being affected by conflicts or things like that. So as I moved on, I found myself doing quite a lot of work around this, and when I joined medical teams, as I said earlier on, and the UN eventually, before I came to SENDEP, I was working around humanitarian response, supporting people that have been displaced, people that have been affected by disasters and things like that. That's amazing story. Thank you. It's such an inspiring story, Simon. You guys should write your own books about what you have seen and how it inspired you. What was the most difficult part? I know it is really nice to help people, but as a person, because you've seen so much, how do you absorb and help people and how do you find it personally? I think helping other people is, in itself, is humanitarian. Basically my understanding of it is that as humans, there is no way we can live without other humans. We should always seek to preserve the lives of those we live with. When it comes to the actions that I actually took to get to where I am today, I think a lot of it was mainly focused on, like you said, contributing towards a humanitarian response in one way or another. When it comes to humanitarian response, usually the first duty, the first focus area when it comes to that particular space is to save lives. When you ask yourself that question, you can try to figure out where do I fit in, where do I fit in with all this and what actually, where do I contribute towards this goal? When I looked at it from the bigger picture, I realized that protecting people did not only involve saving their lives, but also giving them dignified lives. So I focused a lot on the dignity that people had, that people should have, regardless of the situations that they find themselves in, and that became a very big, it became my calling of sorts, because I felt that not only should people's lives be okay, but people should actually live in a dignified way. And in order for them to live in a dignified way, I thought, well, how can I be able to contribute towards this? So a lot of work I have been doing when it came to access to justice was involving sexual and gender-based violence and trying to make sure that these cases of sexual and gender-based violence within the particular refugee camps I was working in and within the districts I was working in in Uganda were actually handled all the way in the best possible legal manner. And the thing about this work is that the organization's mandate was to provide pro bono legal aid services. So this means all our services were basically for free, in the sense that people did not have to pay legal fees to actually come and access us and to be able to get support for the different issues that they actually had within these spaces. In doing that, many people tended to ask the question, so how then did you benefit? And how did you sustain? And how do you sustain? And when it comes to that, I think that was a very big challenge. And when I looked at it, a lot of it had to do with trying to get people who had the funds to actually understand the plight of the people that were working with, the persons of concern, so that they were able to give us that support that we needed to be able to take care of these communities. So, of course, you know, when we sent in applications, we sent in the different bids that were called that were made, we sent in our proposals for different projects that we intended to handle within the area. But, of course, it was still very tricky, and many of the contracts that we managed to get were more in the form of consultancies and only at the level of implementation. That means actually we never really got a chance to participate in the decision-making processes regarding these people, regardless of the fact that we were actually usually the first responders on ground who these people could actually go to for support. So a lot of our actions and motivations were revolving around those particular spaces. Can you give us a story, an example of how challenging it was? So, for example, I can say that when we went to set up the organization, we were so lucky to be given a space, and this space had two... Who gave you the space? This space was actually given to me by my mother. Surprising. And she actually gave me a space within Kitcum Town, which I managed to turn into an office space. So the space had two rooms. In one room, it may not sound like something you can fathom, but we actually, almost all the staff used to stay in one space, and the other room was the office space. And during daytime, we would close the sleeping space and would open the office space. How many of you were there? We were around... By the time we started, we were around four. And then we later on expanded to, of course, by 2020, the organization had expanded to around nine staff and one office administrator. So when it came to that space, we would open the second room for different clients within the areas to actually come in, get all the legal aid services that they required. We worked together with the district. The districts usually are very cooperative, the Kitcum District Local Government was very cooperative to offer us a space, and Lamo District Local Government. So they did offer us a good space. And eventually, with the pro bono work we were doing, because we were doing this work for free all this time, and people had to find other means of surviving. So in all this time, what happened is that eventually we got, because of the work that we were doing, the commendable work that we were doing, actually, we got very many referrals, and we got our first consultancy to do some work within the refugee camp to provide legal training to the different stakeholders, like the police, the UNHCR staff, OPM staff, OPM is the Office of the Prime Minister in Uganda, which is in charge of refugees, all other organizations who are part of the process. So slowly, we managed to build that type of response that we envisaged. But I can say that the challenges that we faced actually what the focus of my research is on, and maybe I can be able to expound on that a bit later. I want to carry on more. So you mentioned that you got a consultancy, so who paid for that? This consultancy was paid for by the LWF, and this is the Lutheran World Federation. International NGO. Yes, they were an international NGO. And so basically, our role was merely to implement, we were not part of the decision-making process, so we implemented. Whereas it was a very good opening ground for us, at the end of the day, growing over time has made me realize that maybe local actors need to have a bigger role when it comes to implementing humanitarian response within these spaces, rather than actually just being implementers or getting them as consultants to do one or two things here and there. They actually need to be a part of the whole process of engagement. That is really interesting. I totally agree that, you know, this whole international business, it's got this positives and negatives, international development agencies, they pay the local agencies to do the jobs for them, but also local agencies have a bigger role to play. That's true. Simon, do you want to explain to us about your challenges and how you overcame them? One of the bigger challenges that I have interfaced or come across is the issue of involvement of the local community, the issue of ensuring a participatory approach for the local community. I have always struggled with this, because oftentimes, as much as I tried to engage the communities to do things and maybe be mostly on the facilitation side, there is an element of these community members thinking that they do not know what to do. They feel like they're always left out. So they don't have the motivation within themselves to do things themselves, or to actually drive these actions by themselves. So it's really a challenge. And in terms of sustainability, it becomes very complicated and difficult to sustain some of the actions that we propose or that we implement in terms of our response to emergencies and also development work. So oftentimes, I've noticed that many of the organizations that respond to humanitarian emergencies take the lead, as opposed to engaging the communities, engaging the communities that are affected in a very participatory manner, let me say. So it becomes very difficult for them to actually think or feel like what they have in terms of capacity is not good enough. So even if they had what it takes for them to actually, for example, build their own resilience within the communities, using the locally available resources, they pull themselves back. They don't want to bring themselves up. They don't want to use what they have to build themselves, because they have been built in the system where things are done for them, and they're only there to receive what is coming. And that is a very big challenge that I've always come across. And I think, in my opinion, moving forward, I think we need to advocate more. And for me, how I tried to do it, personally, was to try and engage more the communities in terms of discussing with them, having dialogue with them, having focus group discussions to understand actually what capacities they have, and how they can use their local capacities and available resources to build themselves, to build their resilience to, for example, climate change, and so to be able to manage such crisis, even before responders come. Interesting. That is one of the biggest challenges of aid sector, international aid, or any kind of development aid anywhere in the world. We think that we are saving the planet. We think that we are helping people, but sometimes we are not really doing the right things. We are making people more dependent on aid. And that makes it even worse for the people that we claim to be supporting. So what do we do then? I think, in my opinion, first, I think this issue of localization needs to be strengthened. What do you really mean by localization? To start with, we, to start with, there is what we call localization is basically driving development by the people themselves, the people that we are targeting as beneficiaries. They need to be on the steering wheel, they need to be at the forefront of everything that we do. And then as development partners, as humanitarian aid workers, we are more, you know, facilitating the processes. We are more facilitating them to be able to do what they can do by themselves. And this is what I call localization. And so it's basically, it's in line with what was discussed and agreed, if I remember, in the World Humanitarian Summit of 2016. Unfortunately, until now, it's, we have not yet achieved much as far as what was agreed in that summit was, in terms of building the capacity of local intervention, you know, agencies, the communities and the people to be able to manage crisis by themselves, and also to be able to implement many of these interventions that we designed. Unfortunately, most of these interventions are designed in using a top-down approach, which is something that we need to, should be in the past by now. And in my opinion, I think that would do us a lot more good. Thank you, Simon. I think that it is true that you know, this localization thing has been going on for many years. But since COVID, I think that because a lot of international travel was restricted, I think that was the trigger for the localization to really have more space. What do you think? When it comes to that, I think that is debatable in many ways. My perspective, as somebody who was operating a local organization, which I would consider to be part of the local actors in the space, is that in some spaces, it actually became a bit tricky to handle that because what happened is that access to the persons of concern became quite difficult during that period of time. So what that meant is that if you are providing services like legal aid and all that, you are not able to actually help the people because you're not able to access the people in the first place. And this went on for a very long time. And different countries had their own restrictions that they were dealing with. And even these humanitarian organizations also had their own challenges that they actually faced. I know there was also a big shift on an international level in regards to priority of funding. It was also changed to much more focus on health because of going concern at that particular point in time. I think that it's debatable in some spaces. But I also know that in particular spaces, it became more of an opportunity for local organizations to actually take the forefront. And when we talk about localization, I think a lot of that, a lot of the discussion has gone also into defining what is local. What is local? What is a local knowledge? Where does it come from and who actually applies? Because even governments, the governments themselves actually consider to be local actors within that space. A government, local NGOs, and even the communities who are actually being supported in that space. So if you look at it from that perspective, very many countries took up the mantle on their own and actually said, you know what? We are taking this up and we are able to provide this support within our own capacity. And we need you maybe to support us with the funding in terms of international aid so that we can actually be able to execute these projects, design them, and engage the communities that we are supporting and actually implement them on our own without this whole imposing process that comes about with the funding and all those requirements that the money that comes in comes with. I think it's just a perspective issue. It created a better space in some countries which were able to handle it, but others, it just kind of fostered the already, I call it, like someone said, that top-down approach that where the aid is looked at as almost like you're saving people. As someone who has worked with these people, people want to be empowered rather than victimized. And in many of these cases, we tend to victimize the people, the persons of concern who we are working with, and we make it look like, I mean, honestly, just now I'm actually just realizing that even the word persons of concern, in some way, maybe also, I don't know if it's empowered. Same with beneficiaries. Yeah, exactly. Same with beneficiaries. It kind of disempowers the people who actually need to be empowered. It changed the trajectory of what I wanted to do with my career. A lot of what I wanted to do was improving myself when it came to human rights because I was within that space. I was within the protection space. But the more I did this work, I actually just came to the realization around 2020, 2021, that what I actually wanted to focus on was not on keeping these people as beneficiaries, in quotes, or dependent on aid that I'm able to provide them. I wanted it to be more of an empowerment process for these communities. So what I mean is that I looked at it from the angle that when it came to, for example, legal aid, I noticed that I was handling the same cases of legal issues, and they would never end. Like, they would never really end. It was bound to be a cycle that continued. And if I continued headstrong in that direction, it will continue probably for the rest of time. But when I looked at it, I said, how can we make these communities, how can we help to develop these communities so that they have the capacity within themselves to actually handle these conflicts at a community level first, and then even with a local actor so that there is no need for this international intervention of sorts. So that's actually what kind of motivated me to come and do my master's in development and emergency practice, because I wanted to look at humanitarian response, not only as saving lives, but also to understand the humanitarian development nexus so that we could see how to make it more sustainable in the future and prevent us repeating the same things over and over again, and then call them durable solutions. So we need to actually have durable solutions, what those that will last for a long period of time, but those that are controlled by the people who are actually being supported in these situations. That is great. I think that you've already given your reflections as well. So Simon, I remember, in our lectures and discussions, you mentioned the experience of Uganda's Ebola response, because during the pandemic, you had a lot of lessons already in your bag. Well, talking about health-related emergencies in Uganda, I think I want to start with, on a positive note, that Uganda has really shown that they have the capacity to respond to new emergencies related to health, and particularly outbreaks like Ebola, COVID, and so on and so forth. Recently, I think about less than a month ago, there was an outbreak that was reported, the Ministry of Health was able to contain the situation, it didn't spread, and I mean, everything went silent. So that explains, and many others that have happened in the past, that explain that Uganda has been, you know, one of the countries that has been so really good and fast in containing such emergencies, outbreaks. As a country, I think Uganda was not spared at all when it came to COVID-19. Many of us went through quite a lot of experience, and personally, I felt the impact of the COVID-19, both at the personal level, and also at work, because if I remember very well, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was working in the southeastern region, in the mountain area, and Mount Elgon area, and was supposed to be doing some activities with the communities, especially in regards to, you know, resilience building for the local communities on climate change. Yeah, but I remember vividly that when the outbreak was announced, all our activities were stopped. Movements were restricted by the government, regardless of what kind of movements there were, only for very specific emergency cases, health-related, for those that were supposed to go to hospital and things like that. So this, in one way or the other, affected our operation as a team as well, and many others. But generally, Uganda has really been steadfast in terms of responding to and containing such situations. But again, as Daniel mentioned, the issue of funding has been coming up very strongly as far as challenges are concerned in responding to such emergencies. Of course, the funding stream really went down. The funding was very much reduced, cut for most of the sectors, except for health, and that in many ways affected things like agriculture, which is a dominant source of livelihood for many Ugandans, was hugely affected, and others. Schools were closed. If you may know, Uganda, I think, was one of the countries that closed the schools for the longest. Nearly two years, schools were closed. So you can imagine what happened when pupils cannot be in school, children are not in school. I mean, schools are locked, and everyone has to be home. And that explains, for example, how and why the number of defilement cases that were reported in the country were very high. I remember where I come from, one of the districts reported in just a space of three months reported over a thousand cases of child abuse, you know, generally, you know, abuse. And this is defilement, early marriages, etc, etc. So this is what came with this COVID and the schools being locked, and so on and so forth. So it was very massive. And because there was very little funding going towards activities like keeping children in school, maybe making sure that they are continuing with education, regardless of the COVID situation, there was little money going towards that. So the issue of prioritization became a very hot topic issue of debate. So as government, we had to prioritize, focus on health more, a lot of money was going to the health, to the Ministry of Health. And again, I want to also, you know, touch a bit on the issue of strings, donor, I mean, donor monies or funds that come with a lot of strings. And this, to me is a big challenge. I've seen, we've seen cases where countries or donor countries give monies for humanitarian response, but with conditions attached to it, conditions like we have to send our experts, for example, from some parts of Europe, because the money is coming from Europe. So we are sending experts to follow this money to make sure that they're part of the implementation. These are people who don't understand the local context, but they were the ones managing the project. So this is a very big challenge. And this is something that I think we need to address if we are to have results at community level. Thank you. Thank you so much, Simon and Daniel. I think that you have given us a changing face of the disasters. You see all these disaster movies, it's all about floods and typhoons and things like that. But you have given us the flavor of conflict, climate change, COVID, violence against children and so on. So this was a very big eye opener for us all. And especially the reality of aid industry and international development. You are here in Europe to study because you already know how things work. And now we are sitting in Europe and discussing about aid business. So hopefully one day the international donors will send you as their savior for their aid money. And maybe we won't need any like Daniel said in the future. We hope for that. I want to conclude our discussion. If there is anything else you would like to ask me or want to add, please feel free to do so. When it comes to our ability as local actors or people who have worked within that space, I know you have also some experience within this space. You have quite an extensive experience within this space. And I'm not so sure in what capacity maybe you would consider yourself even when you are working in your home country, whether you consider yourself as an international or as a local. So maybe also, could you go around what that dynamic plays, how that dynamic plays out regarding you as a humanitarian worker? That is interesting, Daniel. I think you would like to interview me next. Yes, I will talk about my experience in one of the episodes as well. So it will help the audience also to keep the interest for the next episode. Definitely. So stay tuned for the next. Do you have any Mars mantras? I think my Mars mantra would be, do your best to help others live their best. We should not forget why it is that many of us came into this space and the motivations behind why we are doing what we are doing. So if we always keep that at the back of our mind, it helps us to find solutions that are not actually self-serving, but those that focus on helping others in order for them to be able to help themselves. So that's, I could say is my Mars mantra. Thank you very much, Daniel. We know what is happening right now globally. We know what is happening in Africa. And so crises are everywhere every day. And then when it comes to the climate, I remember the UN Secretary General actually mentioned, talked about the climate, the global warming. It's no longer global warming because it's actually boiling. We have reached the boiling point. And that already in itself explains where we are heading as a world. So this is the time to start actually acting, to start doing things as opposed to just sitting in meetings, having conferences and discussing what has to be done. And I think it is the responsibility of all of us, all countries up to, you know, start to act now. Political leaders, humanitarian agencies, development partners and donors, it is time to act. We want to see a world free of crisis. We want to see a world free of emergencies. But it starts with us and it starts now. Thank you, Simon. I think that I'm going to vote you for the next UN Secretary General nominations.