The Uganda Episcopal Conference Justice and Peace department in partnership with the Aid Agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales (CAFOD) are developing new interventions in capacity building program for the diocesan coordinators of Justice and Peace, which aims at ensuring efficiency of service delivery at the diocesan level.
In an interview with AMECEA Online News, Dr. Emmanuel Aliba, head of Justice and Peace Department said that through the partnership with CAFOD the department is planning to empower the diocesan Justice and Peace Coordinators through training in areas of parliamentary liaison, peace building, election monitoring process, public expenditure monitoring and tracking and many other.
Dr Aliba commended CAFOD for journeying with them as their traditional partner in all the activities for which they are grateful. “So far CAFOD has seen us move from a very small department to now quite a big force in the country especially in the areas of oil and gas activities where we are now considered as strategic partners by government, oil companies and communities,” said Dr. Aliba adding that the development was not achieved overnight but taken quite some time and was very challenging.
He said, “Our first intervention in the oil and gas governance was to make a mini baseline survey among the gas and oil communities and we produced the document which we called the people’s voice for social justice.”
Dr Aliba explained that through the support from CAFOD, Justice and Peace Department managed to lobby the local communities, the oil companies and the government and successfully brought them together in a forum for discussions, which yielded the formulation of oil and gas policy which has also been translated into local languages.
Another successful venture, according to Dr Aliba, is the deepening of multi-party democracy in Uganda, a program which was carried out with the support of CAFOD. “We targeted the district local councilors and journalists to deepen their understanding of multi-party dispensation. We had realized that people did not know what multi-party was and in order to work best, you must know the theoretical and the practical background of multi-party dispensation,” Dr. Aliba explained.
By Pamela Adinda, AMECEA Online News