GWED-G was originally founded in 2004 as a response to lack of attention to women’s issues resulting from the LRA War. At the time, our special focus was on war-affected women, war returnees, and widows. Since then, we have grown to examine and address all issues affecting disadvantaged and marginalized peoples, with emphasis on women and girls.

We are a grassroots organization that proudly serves northern communities in Uganda. We target communities in the Acholi Sub-region – particularly in the districts of Gulu, Amuru, Omoro, and Nwoya. However, we do have projects running in Kitgum, Pader, and Agago districts currently.

GWED-G currently has more than 30 project staff and is a gender-balanced organization.

As we are a grassroots organization, our beneficiaries are largely people in rural communities. We believe that sustainable development must include initiatives that support strengthening local government, therefore, we always include government actors in all our programs.

We work with women and men, boys and girls. We work across all types of religious affiliations and cultural institutions.

We aim to implement programming that benefits the most vulnerable peoples in our northern communities. This includes widows, people living with HIV/AIDS, war returnees, Sexual and Gender Based Violence Survivors, people with disabilities, orphans and vulnerable children, among others.

We firmly believe that sustainable development means understanding and addressing all development issues. We take a holistic approach to addressing women’s and girls’ issues because each area necessitates attention and often these areas overlap one another.

We have multiple approaches to carry out our programming goals and our approaches depend on the project.

One approach includes the Male Engaged Initiative, whereby men are included as change agents to positively impact their communities and drive gender equality forward.

We also use approaches like community sensitizations and dialogues, to help bring about awareness of certain issues and create interest in finding solutions that work for each different community.

For women’s leadership, we use a Women’s Caucus mentoring, to help build solidarity among current and aspiring women leaders, as well as to sharpen leadership skills. The idea is to help encourage women to stand for public offices – especially at the local level – to include more voices representing women’s and girls’ issues in the government.