Where We Work:

About the conflict

Joseph Kony was the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that emerged in the late 1980s and became increasingly violent throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The group kidnapped and murdered thousands of innocent civilians in northern Uganda and displaced nearly 2 million people. The LRA was were particularly known for their brutality against children, abducting more than 35,000 children and forcing them to serve as combatants in their efforts to overthrow the government. 

The combination of direct violence, economic devastation, and disease resulting from mass displacement led to thousands of children orphaned and in need of care. While many institutions stepped up to care for these children, many were unable to secure sufficient resources to sustain their operations and provide quality care.

About our approach

IPI partnered with local leaders in and around Kampala, the capital of Uganda, and Jinja to establish 5 reproducible poultry farms to provide a source of financial sustainability for multiple orphanages caring for children affected by war and violence. The motivation behind this objective was to see orphanages and similar charitable organizations across Uganda become self-sustainable while simultaneously improving the local economy through job creation and increased economic productivity. Throughout the project, the IPI team organized regular service trips to facilitate cross-cultural exchange and volunteer opportunities.

Lessons Learned

Sustainability Becomes Reproducibility: After our work in Iraq, we realized that planning self-sustainable work should also be self-reproducible. Therefore, we invested in five poultry farms attached to major orphanages/academies, and we did so under the agreement that as these farms reproduced, the owners would help others launch their own without further investment from us. At last count, a local organization estimated that this project reproduced over 100 times when we included small family farms.

Local leadership: It was also in Uganda where we learned the importance of leading projects with local ideas, local leadership, and local management.

Letting go: We believe the best peacebuilding should always keep “the end of our involvement” in mind. Planting seeds of peace that become a whole garden will only be truly integrated into the local peace structures if we release these structures to locals who accompany the process in the first place