Story of our Group

Boomu Women’s Group was formed in 1999, in the village of Kihaguzi, with the aim of fighting poverty in the area by creating economic and social development. So far we have done this through raising the incomes of our members. All our members are subsistence farmers meaning that most food that is grown is for domestic consumption and what is left is taken to the market. However in order to raise incomes, some families increase the amount they take to the market leaving themselves hungry. The lives of our members and the surrounding community is typical of Uganda as a whole as 82% of the population are in the agricultural sector and the GDP per person is $249 (2003). The largest source of expenditure is on education costs such as secondary school fees, textbooks, and uniforms. Other items of expenditure include soap, paraffin, clothes once a year and occasionally meat. However our members’ income from farming, due to the low amount produced and lack of access to markets, rarely cover all these items. Therefore raising member’s income creates development not only by reducing household poverty and the inadequacy of the diet, but also through increasing educational levels. For our members’ there are few alternate livelihoods in particular for women so the group was formed to provide another income stream through weaving baskets. By working together training and advice can be shared and our products sold together through one outlet.

The Tourism Project

The number of baskets we sale is very variable. Therefore, we decided to diversify our activities in order to generate more income. We decided to try to benefit from on our location next to a major tourism route by setting up a small tourism project. This would also hopefully increase the market for our products. The group brought land in the village of Kigaragara, next to Murchison Falls National Park, 3 miles away from their current location. We put aside initially, 10% and then 15% of our income from baskets towards this project. We managed to start building accommodation in 2004 with assistance from UCOTA. We received further seed funding from UCOTA in 2006 to furnish the bandas. UCOTA also sent a volunteer to work with us for six months to bring the site up to standard and to provide marketing assistance.

The project has taken a long time to develop as we had to overcome many constraints in order to build the physical infrastructure and the skills capacity required to offer a tourism product with high enough standards for visitors. These constraints occurred due to the fact we are a low income, low skilled group located in a rural area with no public transport.

Our objective for this tourism project is for it to be a participatory experience: for our group, the local community and for the visitor. The surrounding community have been involved in the development of the project and would be happy to have people visiting them, seeing their everday life and their needs such as education that our project is trying to address. Our chairperson will be delighted to share with you everything she knows about local life, history, culture, traditions and the issues that affect us. This means visitors will directly engage with the recipients of their tourism spend and can see exactly what the impact of their stay will be.

As well as bringing economic and social development directly to our members and the local communities we also wish to create economic development indirectly. We hope that if the project becomes successful we can inspire other people to come together and also work towards economic and social development.

The Community Project

We also wanted to assist the community that the project is now located in so we set up a nursery in 2004 with our chairperson doing the teaching. Due to a lack of land as the tourism project developed and the lack of human resources and finance to cater to the children, we had to close it down. We had 22 children and it was very popular with the local community. For some children, attending the nursery has been all the education they have received.

At the end of 2005, our chairperson brought land that surrounded the project on two sides. The nursery will be located on this land. As soon as we have enough money to cover the capital and running costs of the nursery, we will open it again. We have allocated all the money from the community tour and a percentage of the turnover towards a community fund that will finance the nursery and hopefully in the future if the tourism project is successful, other community projects.

Other Activities

As part of our diversification activities we have also trained in additional handcrafts such as weaving bedcovers and are setting up a henhouse. In order to support our members in their primary activity, farming, we have registered the group with the local farmers’ association using our project funds. This will enable us to receive training, advice on what crops to grow and give us access to markets for our crops. Membership will also support the tourism project as we hope to establish a project farm, a small fish pond and learn beekeeping which are all activities the association can assist us with.