World Voices Uganda - WVU

General

World Voices Uganda is human rights, Access to Justice for the poor and most vulnerable and Peace building not-for-profit organization which started its operations in 2005. World Voices Uganda is part of the World Voices Global with affiliation to WorldVoices Norway and is the only independent chapter in Southern, Eastern and Central Africa. For the last 15 years WVU has developed capacity and niche with the main thrust is in providing legal aid services to the indigent people mainly women, children, PWDs and other vulnerable persons in conflict with the law, promotion of natural resource governance specifically Minerals, oil and gas, land and forestry resources as well as lake resources, promotion and protection of the rights of the marginalized mainly children and women rights, budget analysis and dissemination, Revenue enhancement and management, Tax justice, influencing and advocacy, transparency and accountability, research, youth empowerment through skills development and advocacy as well as peace building, conflict resolution and management. Our aim is to empower marginalized Ugandans and to give them a voice in society to advance their possibilities to exert agency. As echoed in our slogan, WVU is the voice of the voiceless. WVU advocates for concrete and innovative solutions to injustice,social exclusion, poverty and its intergenerational continuity. World voices Uganda was founded by two then young people of of whom was an investigative Journalist from Uganda while another was a Norwegian Social Anthropology Researcher named Dr Rune Hjlmar Espeland (PhD). Following their comprehensive research on and coverage of violent ethnic and land conflicts and Human Rights Violations and Injustice especially Gender Based Violence and Child Abuse in the Albertine region, they came to an Idea of starting an Organisation would make a contribution by providing selfless and innovative approaches to finding a solution. Hence indeed the inception process and ideation kicked started in 2003, while the organisation formation process started in 2004 which eventually saw the actual operation commence officially in 2005. WVU then started with Sports For Peace Project in which sports was used as a tool for addressing ethnic differences in the Albertine and Rwenzori regions, this was followed by the Community Peace Dialogues and Roundtable for the stakeholders addressing issues of peace and then followed by creation of community legal aid clinic which was addressing Gender Based related violations and Child abuse case. WVU has since grown in both programing and operations but also geographically to cover many other parts of Uganda. WVU has of late expanded her scope to cover different Refugee settlements in partnership with OPM. World Voices which started with the development of a one year Strategic Plan in 2006-2007 is currently implementing her fourth strategic plan (2017-2022) World Voices Uganda has undergone strategic growth in terms of governance and organisation policy in which we have seen peaceful transitioning of the Board and formulation and implementation of progressive policies including Gender and safeguarding policies. World Voices is national organisation providing comprehensive programs interventions at community level, sub national and national level of which most of the physical concentration of community interventions are in Western Uganda, part of Central and Northern Uganda. Currently the organsation is running a five year strategic plan with four major core program areas namely; 1) Human Rights and Access to Justice (HRAJ) 2) Peace Building and Conflict mitigation and management (PCM), 3) Governance and Accountability, Research and Knowledge management (GARM), 4) Institutional Support Servicing and Strengthening (ISSS)