Early History of AWE

The idea of helping the women farmers near Bobi, south of Gulu in the Northern Region of Uganda, started back in 2008 when Joyce Lockard and her husband Ray visited Gulu University to help unpack and sort a shipping containerful of used textbooks sent by Beaverton Rotary Club to help start the collection of books in the new university library and for distribution to primary and secondary schools. During that visit, they met Christine Aoyo, wife of the University Librarian. Christine was working for World Vision in a refugee camp for internally displaced persons about five miles from Gulu. The camp was guarded by soldiers to keep the people who had fled to the camp safe from the murderous roving  militia of the Lord’s Resistance Army, which was burning and pillaging villages and farms in the Northern Region, killing people of all ages and kidnapping children. Eventually, the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels displaced more than a million Ugandans from their homes.

Christine showed Joyce and Ray around the very rudimentary camp and took them to see villages where poor women farmers were struggling to grow enough food to feed their families. Christine, has a Bachelor’s degree in agriculture and Master’s in agribusiness. She has been training women farmers as a volunteer for many years, but neither SAS nor the women farmers has had any resources to spend for equipment.

When they got back home,  Joyce and Ray described the desperate lives of the women farmers to Beaverton Rotary members and got their club to do seven consecutive District Grants that aimed to help the women farmers grow more food. The small NGO called SAS that Chrisine had started in Uganda became Beaverton’s partner and it implemented each the District Grants.

In 2018, when it became apparent that the small District Grants were not making sustainable differences in the lives of the women, a team of three Rotarians, Joyce Lockard, John Cook and Paul Alley, went to Uganda for Beaverton Rotary to do a Community Assessment in preparation for applying for a Global Grant.

John Cook, a retired lawyer, was particularly distressed by the plight of the women farmers and realized that he could personally help most by developing SAS into a social business or B business, by buying land to be a physical site for SAS  and developing infrastructure for it. He envisioned that SAS would become a permanent community organization and the improvements brought about by the global grant project were likely to be truly sustainable only if SAS had a permanent home.  John hired a Ugandan lawyer to establish the new social business legally as Agrilinks for Women Empowerment LLC, abbreviated as AWE.  Over the next year, he provided funds with which AWE bought a 5.5-acre plot of land on the main highway to Kampala, surveyed and leveled it, dug a well, hired a certified architect to design a grain storehouse and a training center to be known as the Women’s Empowerment Center, bought two used vehicles for the project and built an 8’ tall security wall around the entire plot of land.

Before John passed away in October of 2022, he created a 5013c called, Fund to Benefit Women Farmers of Northern Uganda, which is recognized by the IRS in the United States. Donations from this fund are managed by his daughter, and are wired directly to AWE.