From Pain to Power: Women and Their Data Speak for Themselves

Kosovo Informal Settlement (KIS), built incrementally since 1989, is one of the densest urbanisations in Greater Kampala, Uganda, built on low-lying ‘crown’ land and home to 10,085 low-income households with self-built infrastructure. The poorest among them are women-headed households (WHHHs), most with children.

They need everything, from respect and protection, to basic education, income, nutrition and proper drainage. Increasingly, erratic weather in the context of climate change has inundated the KIS community under exceptionally heavy rains and poor run-off, leading to frequent flooding, loss of home and property, water-borne disease outbreaks, and displacement.

Located in a flood-prone wetland zone, KIS faces persistent environmental and health hazards worsened by poor infrastructure and lack of services. The community is self-organized with traditional leadership structures, but without representation in policy-making processes or formal urban development planning. These conditions make the area highly vulnerable to climate shocks and systemic exclusion, particularly for women-headed households (WHHHs) who bear the brunt of compounded social, economic, and environmental risks.

Intensifying floods in Kampala, particularly at KIS during 2025, have ravaged these ladies’ homes and surroundings, threatening them and their children with even-deeper poverty and sickness, compounding existing vulnerabilities and wreaking untold heavy costs, loss and damage (CLD). Alone, they cannot cope with such costs amid the extreme marginalization and indifference within wider society. Part of their stigmatization is the typical assumption that, as the poorest of the poor, their losses have little or no value. Despite the clear human and material impact, no quantification of their CLD was able either to counter that prejudice or inform urgently needed remedial measures.

To fill this gap, Habitat Defenders Africa (HDA), a Ugandan non-profit member network of 502 youth professionals from diverse and complementary fields, has adapted the HLRN quantification method as a  “Climate Change Impact Assessment and Justice Tool” (CCIAJT) to document the women’s values at stake aligned with both the UN remedy and reparations framework (RRF) and UNFCCC Loss & Damage Fund (FRLD) eligibility criteria, intending to build further interventions based on the findings, considering gender-differentiated impacts.

Based on previous consultations with these WHHHs, HDA’s youthful team surveyed the climate change-induced CLD of a purposive 30-WHHH sample to channel their values and voices to the wider community, media, local authorities, policy makers and even the distant FRLD. Meanwhile, HDA assumed the findings would also reveal other needs for basic skills, legal literacy and guidance to establish and manage a self-help cooperative. One proposed follow-up is a plan to provide the assistance of lawyers, engineers and trainers from within HDA’s ranks, local allies, HLRN, and an already-identified ILO-consultant trainer on Our.COOP.

With CCIAJT-generated data, HDA supported the Kosovo women to disseminate the story of their values at stake and present it in response to FRLD’s call for case studies, and for seeking physical drainage upgrading from municipal and international-development partners. Later in 2025–26, HDA plans legal and administrative literacy workshops to strengthen the ladies’ advocacy skills and build capacity to organize their own cooperative and social force.

The initial survey reported 73% of WHHHs incurring flood damage to their mostly freehold-tenure housing. However, 58% of homes underwent total destruction and direct losses of wealth and property. Half of the women reported losing housing contents. Fully 43% lost all housing contents, with replacement costs ranging from UGX700,000 to 800,000 (€170—194).

The enumeration exercise has resulted in a conservative estimate of €55,021 in material and immediately measurable values to replace the 30 surveyed women-headed household costs, losses and damage arising from the floods until the end of May 2025. Extrapolating this formula to determine the values at stake for the Kosovo community’s 10,085 Kosovo households reaches at least €18,496,132.

For this urban climate crisis-affected group, the initial survey revealed only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Since the CCIAJT application at the beginning of 2025’ second quarter, the January 2025 floods promise to return, while the initial CLD continues to accumulate.

For this HDA initiative, long term means one year on, whereupon HDA enumerators would return in 12 months, resources permitting, to capture the cumulative changes in household values, expenditures, well-being and living conditions. Those data would determine not only the degree of the HDA intervention’s relevance and impact, but would form a basis for longer-term planning and replication of the intervention in neighboring settlements. Outcomes at year’s end would also indicate sustainability and feasibility of using the CCIAJT method in other applications elsewhere, not least across FRLD’s field of operations within its start-up plan (FRLD/B.5/7), focusing on “community-driven priorities and needs” and “small grants that prioritize community-led activities” (FRLD, 2025).

HDA and HLRN are now cooperating to prepare the KIS findings as an application to FRLS for remedy of the community’s CLD. Progress at that pursuit will be covered in future issues of Land Times/أحوال الأرض.

Photo: Local resident of Kosovo Informal Settlement, telling her story at the 21 May 2021 press conference on findings of the CCIAJT application there. Source: HDA.