The Role of Civil Society Organisations in The Promotion of Women’s Rights in Amolatar Town Council, Amolatar District

ABSTRACT This report on the role of CSOs in the promotion of women rights was carried out by the researcher because of a growing concern about the fast changing women rights violation trends, and other forms of donor alignment and their possible implications for work on gender equality and women’s rights issues, in Arnolatar district, Northern Uganda. In many countries CSOs play a crucial role in working towards gender equality and women’s rights through representing, supporting and defending vulnerable groups of women; keeping gender equality and women’s rights issues on policyrnakers’ agendas; fighting for women’s rights at a legislative level; and holding governments and other stakeholders to account over their implementation of gender-related commitments. Understanding how they are faring under the new aid mechanisms becomes critical in understanding whether current funding is supporting or inhibiting the commitment to gender equality and women’s rights present in so many policies. The report highlights some of the key questions emerging for civil society around the way the new aid systems promote, marginalise or exclude gender equality and women’s rights issues, as well as developing themes for future targeted research. The report reflects the voices of organisations working for gender equality and women’s rights from around the world. It conveys the diversity and complexity of the issues around the new aid modalities and how these differ across countries and continents; it also shows some of the unintended consequences of new aid modalities. Above all, it reveals that many women’s organisations and those focused on challenging gender inequality feel threatened as the focus of funding moves in the direction of larger grants, tighter, short term targets, demonstrable and ‘scaled up’ results, and intensive administration. While progress has been made in some areas, many of the challenges and obstacles identified in 1995 still remain. In addition, the new challenges for women’s empowerment and gender equality that have emerged over the past decade, such as the feminization of the AIDS epidemic, feminization of migration, and increasing of trafficking on women need to be more effectively addressed.