KEY TAKEAWAYS
KEY TAKEAWAYS
At age five, Muhsin Kaduyu began following his father, a respected imam in southern Uganda, on missions of peace — constant meetings, mediations, consolations and prayers among Muslims and Christians in their town and surrounding farmlands. So years later, Kaduyu felt sickened when Islamist suicide bombers killed 74 soccer fans in a crowd near his university, deforming and defaming his faith. That bombing, and an anti-Muslim backlash, ignited a life’s mission that has made Kaduyu a prominent peacebuilder among millions of Ugandans who struggle for survival, prosperity and peace amid communal conflicts, violent extremism and growing climate disaster.
Uganda’s struggle is familiar across Africa. While Uganda and many African countries expanded their economies and reduced poverty rates early in this century, the COVID pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine and climate disasters interrupted that rise. Africans’ improving life expectancies now drive the fastest population growth of any continent; so even if poverty rates are lower, more people are in need. Providing education, jobs and hope for Ugandans’ futures requires even faster economic growth than before. Roughly 1 million Ugandans per year now enter the labor force, and the inability of many to find livelihoods is the greatest driver of violent extremism, research research finds. Authoritarian governance and corruption constrain growth and long-term stability. Worse, our planet’s degrading climate threatens communities’ productivity and livability, and triggers new conflicts. While scholars say research is needed on the precise connections between climate change and extremism, they note evidence that matches Kaduyu’s account from Uganda’s grass roots.
“We can see at the ground level that it is not religions — whether Islam or any other — that push people into extreme and violent ideas; it is hopelessness and fear that arises mostly from poverty and people’s feelings of marginalization and a loss of human dignity,” Kaduyu said in an interview. “Increasingly, we are seeing climate disasters deepen our people’s poverty and desperation, and this can only make violence more likely.” Ugandans for decades endured a brutal war in the north waged by the Lord’s Resistance Army; recent years have brought violence by the Islamic State group based largely across Uganda’s border in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
As Earth’s climate changes, Uganda’s average temperature has risen by 2.3° Fahrenheit (1.3° Celsius) since the 1960s. The majestic Rwenzori Mountains, towering over 16,000 feet (5,000 meters) along the Uganda-DRC border, have lost much of their white snowcaps. Their millennia-old glaciers will likely disappear by 2050, scientists say. Hotter air intensifies rainstorms. These, combined with snowmelt, trigger roaring floods that have swept away towns and villages, even as droughts disrupt growing seasons for coffee, sugar or other crops. Uganda and other African states face a catastrophic collision between the world’s fastest-growing populations and declining food production that could escalate poverty by 20 to 30 percent above current levels, according to a review of 139 research studies by Ghanaian economist Philip Kofi Adom.
Kaduyu was the 26th of his father’s 31 children and, he laughs, “I experienced firsthand the dynamics of a diverse household with siblings from different mothers!” Still, “our home was like a religious seminary — an interfaith mediation and conflict resolution center. It was a place of harmony and peace for all.” When his father took the young Muhsin to his meetings and ceremonies at mosques, churches or homes across Mbarara, “I saw how people met him and heard him with great respect. Also,” Kaduyu smiles, “as a little boy I was also impressed that so many of these occasions included good food!”
In 2010, Kaduyu had moved to Uganda’s capital, Kampala, to study. On July 11 he joined millions of soccer fans celebrating Africa’s first hosting of the World Cup final. Amid crowds in Kampala watching the broadcast from Johannesburg, including a packed stadium’s ovation for the aging Nelson Mandela, explosions erupted. Kaduyu, watching with friends at his university nearby, recalls his stunned agony at the news: Suicide bombers of Somalia’s al-Shabab extremist group had killed 74 people and wounded hundreds.
“Within a few weeks, a lot of discussion on TV and in the public was that Muslims were the problem. Muslims were being harassed, some were arrested for having beards,” Kaduyu recalled. “That was when I knew my mission was to be a bridge-builder and peace practitioner.” He began shaping an organization, Allied Muslim Youth Uganda” (AMYU), to promote interfaith harmony, especially among youth.
More than a decade later, AMYU has trained hundreds of Ugandans, including pastors, imams and other religious leaders who mentor youth in their communities, promoting conflict resolution and nonviolence. AMYU teams tutor and support university students and leaders of rural communities in promoting peace. Kaduyu serves on an Interfaith Dialogue Forum of the African Union and is prominent among Ugandan youth peacebuilders whose work USIP supports as vital to Uganda’s long-term stability. Another group launched in response to the 2010 bombing is the Ugandan Muslim Youth Development Forum, which works notably to promote women’s roles in preventing violent extremism.
Women, like youth, are prominent Ugandan peacebuilders. Betty Bigombe, from northern Uganda, became a government peace envoy, courageously traveling into the stronghold of the Lord’s Resistance Army to negotiate directly with the dangerous warlord Joseph Kony. A survivor of that war, Eunice Otuko Apio, has led grassroots and international efforts to recover children abducted by armed groups, many effectively enslaved and sexually assaulted. Bigombe has been a USIP fellow and Apio a finalist for the Women Building Peace Award.
Uganda continues to need peacebuilding leadership, notably among youth.
Uganda continues to need peacebuilding leadership, notably among youth. While President Yoweri Museveni’s 38-year-old authoritarian administration has recently managed better economic growth than many of Uganda’s neighbors, a USIP-convened expert study group and analyses such as the Ibrahim Index of African Governance note risks to the country’s stability from official corruption, repressions of opposition groups and constrictions on civil society. Uganda is scheduled for a presidential election in 18 months that will raise such basic issues of governance. The previous election, in 2021, included violence by state security forces.
Extremist violence in Uganda surged last year. Poverty, deepened by drought and other climate shocks, keeps many young Ugandans vulnerable to desperation. The Islamic State’s Central Africa Province (known in Uganda by the name of its locally rooted progenitor, the Allied Democratic Forces) “has found a hotspot for recruitment” in eastern Uganda, said Kaduyu. Across lowlands dotted with farming villages, the once predictable wet and dry seasons have become irregular, with both droughts and periods of heavy rain and floods. That unpredictability makes it risky to seek the better incomes from planting large cash crops, so “most families are growing subsistence crops of maize or sugar cane or cassava,” Kaduyu said.
Muslims are a sizeable minority, often a quarter to a third of local districts. Many are culturally conservative “and they feel marginalized from society and especially the government,” Kaduyu said. “We first went to hear their stories and they expressed anger at how government officials enter the communities’ mosques without removing their shoes, or that police, if they detain women, force them to remove their veils. The residents don’t trust the idea of sending their girls to government schools and they don’t engage with official programs meant to help alleviate poverty.” Extremist activists encourage the mistrust, recruit young men and smuggle them cross-country to forests in the DRC, where the Islamic State group trains its fighters, Kaduyu and independent research and news reports say.
AMYU went to work in selected villages, gathering young Christian and Muslim residents for sports, for conversations with each other and with visiting religious leaders from various faiths, and with police officers, to build familiarity and trust. And “we gather the different sides to talk about the communities’ problems and how to solve them.” Often, the problem has been a lack of potable water supplies that leave women and children to walk long distances to fetch it. So AMYU has helped villages organize to drill water wells, “and this gives the entire community a resource to manage and maintain together for the benefit of everyone. We encourage them to make these management committees very inclusive, with active roles by women and youth.”
As communities build trust across their internal divides, they have asked AMYU’s support in new efforts to connect with, instead of avoid, government services, Kaduyu said. “We have helped them form committees and lobby for government help,” he said.
Kaduyu clearly celebrates the local successes of peacebuilding work. But nationally and regionally, he said, “the overall picture is that extremism continues, and it is driven by many things, but especially poverty. If we don’t see an improvement in people’s incomes, it will persist.”
Mona Hein is a visiting scholar on USIP’s Religion and Inclusive Societies team.