Diary: Climate impacts in Uganda - Part three

Agriculturalists in Uganda aren't the only group of people reporting serious changes to their climate. The same changes have been observed by pastoralists and semi-pastoralists - people who keep herds of cattle and other livestock and are more or less mobile.

Pastoralists mostly live in the more arid areas, and are highly skilled at living with a harsh and highly variable climate - provided they have the space to move. That space, however, is increasingly being denied them as governments try to settle them, and farmers fence off migration routes.

In the community of Jie near Kotido, in the northeastern region of Karamoja, Martina Longom looks after her three children and her animals. In March the land is parched; her husband and the other men have taken most of the cattle away with them far to the west where they know the places where there's likely to still be good pasture.

Martina talked to Oxfam researchers looking at the impact of climate change on women's lives as part of the Oxfam project "Sisters on the Planet". "In the past there was enough rain. Whenever it rained the fields would yield all kinds of fruit and our mothers would store lots of food in our granaries. We used to have plenty of boiled sorghum and porridge to eat and plenty of milk to drink. But now things are different," she explains.

"Cows are dying. The rains have disappeared. And when it rains these days, it just drizzles. The drizzle does not enable the sorghum to grow properly. The climate is unpredictable now. And when it does rain, it can be destructive; it sometimes causes bad floods, which then destroy our crops, just like last year.

"The drinking water that we used to fetch from the riverbeds can no longer be found. The riverbeds have dried up as well. Only hard rock is found beneath them. There is a lot of thirst; even the few livestock we own have so little water. I lament, 'what can I do to address this thirst?'. Even if you have food to cook, you still need water to do the cooking. What can I do?"

Martina's speaking of the Karamojong strategy of digging into the sand of the riverbed to find water that has seeped down, but even this has dried up. There are varieties of trees that withstand drought, like the Valentine tree or the Aperu, and in extreme circumstances people pick their leaves to make a sauce or mix with sorghum flour.

She says that every time she goes to cut wood she has to walk further, as all the trees near her village have been cut down. That exposes her to danger from attack and sexual assault.

She sells firewood in the nearest town and with the money she gets, she buys salt and small fish. Her biggest worry is the medical expense if one of her children needs to go to hospital.

Oxfam is helping Karamojong women like Martina through establishing grain stores so they can eke out the cereals they grow while their men folk are away.

This is the third in a five-part series, re-published from the Oxfam GB climate change and poverty blog. You can read part one here and part two here.

A new Oxfam report on the impacts of climate change on poor people in Uganda will be published in early July.

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