BIC and Mama Hope — A partnership founded with trust and built on a commitment to sustainability.
Budondo Intercultural Center’s mission is to support individuals and families to lead healthy and productive lives, Their model is centered around the wellbeing of all people in the community through a three-tier program strategy. The primary program — Suubi Health Center, provides not only access to quality and affordable maternal and child care but also general health services to the public. The second program — Sustainability plan, is increasing locally generated income that powers the operational cost at Suubi and increasing household income among families. The third program — Population, Health and Environment, improves livelihoods among families by improving food security, household income through agriculture, environmental protection through tree planting and soil conservation.
“Budondo Intercultural Center, before Mama Hope, was a fragment of smaller groups that were not yet registered with the local government. Our journey saw us move through three phases of transition to get to where we are today.
The first one was where the organisation was a group of people called Atuwa Troop. It was organised and led, the board and everything, by a selection of different community members from the surrounding villages. This one had some issues with materialising because of lack of consensus from the different heads of leadership from the board, the treasury, and so some of the partnerships including with the BBC kind of fell flat.
The second phase was where we had an integration between the community and some Mukisa Family members. That went for a couple of years or so but there were issues around trust where folks thought that when the Mukisa family hosted visitors from abroad some of the resources were not getting to the community. We decided to hold a conversation together with our community and guests from abroad so that the community had a chance to ask every question openly and all the falsehoods were kind of rectified. At that time the Mukisa family decided to take some time away from the arrangement.
The third phase of the evolution of BIC was when the family came together. Myself, my six siblings and our parents, started building the blocks of BIC from family resources, and that is how the organisation, or the then performing group, came through different phases to develop and grow into Budondo Intercultural Center.
BIC now had a strong leadership team that had a vision and passion. We integrated other opinion leaders from within the community that also had the passion, the knowledge and the community solidarity to build a maternal health center within Budondo. The theater group used to perform about maternal related cases that we witnessed in the community and got the community engaged in dialogue after every theatre forum. We also had a chance to train a group of 32 women from 8 villages in community health between 2010 and 2014. These women became the Suubi Women, the experts. They provided first aid and other services when we didn’t have a physical health centre. Back then our impact range was between 5,000 people in a year or so. We were covering about half of the costs that we had and the rest was volunteered by family members and some community members who were part of the team. We didn’t have any income generating projects specifically for the organisation, we had around four staff members, and no facility at all, no building at all, where we could do our work.
It was around 2012 when we came to learn about Mama Hope through a colleague and a friend whom we were working with. Mama Hope believed in our model from the beginning. We had home grown solutions to community challenges as a family in collaboration with local leaders from surrounding villages, as well as the Suubi Women. Mama Hope believed that the family was going to spearhead a lot of changes within the community to create immense impact. An impact and a vision that no other outside organisation had been able to see.
Up to now we have received around 10 global advocates and we have had over $650,000 USD come through Mama Hope direct to BIC. There have been really tangible touch points around trust, and with that we were able to adapt to each other’s working style. This steered a lot of growth and development within BIC as an organization. We built a health center, a community hall, bought motorbikes and created impact in many areas together with Mama Hope.
As a team, we have grown significantly. Besides the physical infrastructure of the organisation, team members have grown as a result of this partnership. The partners conference for instance has had a big impact on our team, being able to discuss different meanings of sustainability and how we’ve adapted that within our community, strategic planning, building resilience programs, how to do advocacy with local and international players, making connections with organisations like Global Citizen, Segal Family Foundation and Grassroots Economics. We built strong monitoring and evaluating systems and developed our programs around agriculture. We have engaged with really interesting permaculture concepts and learned how to have regenerative agriculture practices that ensure sustainability and environmental conservation of our society.
Up to now we’ve had very many hundreds of individual supporters come through and support our work and helped us build to a point where we’ve felt confident enough to recently take over a Canadian based organisation that was working around maternal child’s health in Central Uganda. We met the former country director during the Mama Hope Annual Partner Conference and discussed how much we have in common and how our model inspired the way we were addressing maternal child health issues. When they were transitioning out of Uganda they were looking for a respected community model that would thrive and drive their work in Central Uganda forward, and BIC was the organization identified to do that. In 2019, we were able to take over Shanti Uganda Society as one of our programs and that connection happened through Mama Hope.
If we fast forward to the current moment and look at how these different building blocks have come together, we can see now that the BIC team is strong and it is 100% Ugandan. We have grown to around 45 staff in both Budondo and Luweero. Our leadership team, with the likes of Sam, David and Fred holding masters degrees and almost 25 years of experience in community development work between them. We have people who are doing really amazing work to build our vision around maternal health outcomes, addressing both acute obstacles and the underlying barriers around food security and environmental conservation.
The theatre group still works perfectly well. They act out messages and health cases that happen within the community. The community was also engaged in defining the kind of solutions we need for our community. They act out a play, then the community steps into the play and tries to revise solutions. It becomes like a part of participatory research where we critique and evaluate the programs and projects we are doing. In other words it is a really tangible form of feedback that we collect and we use to inform changes to our programming.
Back then in 2012, we were impacting around 5000 people per year. Right now we are impacting around the same number of people on a monthly basis. This can be split by how many people we can serve at the health centre, for example child births between 25 & 30 per month, antenatal care visits around 150, the pregnant women we see each month, and with immunization we have around 2,000 vaccine shots every month including cervical cancer, and other childhood immunizable diseases. When you look at the Household Population, Health and Environment strategy we are seeing over 3000 people impacted on a monthly basis and around 500 under the motorcycle business. There are close to a hundred household families that get daily income under our motorcycle taxi loan scheme and it is generating income for our own operations too. In terms of the health center infrastructure, we’ve built the general ward, we built an antenatal care ward with a space for minor surgeries or minor surgical theatre. We have two water sources benefitting the organisation and the community at large. We have a community tree nursery unit and a demonstration farm. Our Suubi Health Center is currently serving as a referral facility. The majority of our patients are complicated cases being referred from smaller health units and drugs. Many arrive unconscious. We are currently underway building a much larger hospital which will cater for specialized services such as surgeries not existent in the region. Five floors are now under construction. We just finished the ground floor — kind of, the pillars and the slabs. When it is fully functional it will have the ability to serve a catchment population of over 500,000 people.
Mama Hope believes in our model. A mutual respect transcends this kind of partnership and we have all of the above to be proud of as the outcome. Other organizations have started realizing the value of home grown solutions in a style and manner that makes sense to the community and I think BIC’s partnership with Mama Hope is the perfect example that these kind of partnerships not only make sense, but they work. Just look at all that’s been achieved!”
You can support BIC and our other community-led partners directly by giving to the MAMA HOPE Resilience Fund at https://mamahope.networkforgood.com/projects/98593-resilience-fund
