Patricia Kabatabazi
CHEC Uganda: Coordinator of Gender Mainstreaming and Capacity Building in Eastern Africa
She has made presentations at World Water Week conferences in Stockholm in 2004 and 2005 and has engaged in training of trainers in Gender Mainstreaming in both Africa and India. She brought these issues to CHEC’s attention at the Commonwealth People’s Forum prior to the 2007 CHOGM in Kampala Uganda and subsequently worked closely with the CHEC team in London to set up and carry out training sessions on gender mainstreaming supported by Commonwealth Foundation funding between 2009 and 2012. In 2012, participants came from Kenya, Uganda, and Burundi. Tanzania, Rwanda, the relatively small financial outlay having a major impact by training the trainers.
Faced by difficulties of moving around during the COVID-19 pandemic, Patricia she up a banana plantation to provide food and income for impoverished women in her community. Her real-life, hands-on approach is of great value to CHEC.
Patricia has valuable qualifications and experience in gender mainstreaming in water projects that she uses to run training sessions for women and men in East Africa. She gained Master’s degree in water resource management, from the prestigious UNESCO Institute for Water Education (UNESCO-IHE) specializing in gender issues in water use and management. She is a powerful advocate for women’s issues and guides CHEC on how to manage them in African projects.
She is an ambassador of the Gender and Water Alliance for Eastern Africa and a Coordinator of the Gender Mainstreaming Programme in Eastern Africa. In 2003, she spearheaded research around Lake Victoria on the role of gender in natural resource management, writing the Uganda chapter, the results of which are now being used in the Community headquarters for Eastern Africa in Arusha, Tanzania.