Every afternoon, over a dozen young women gather at Elephante Commons, a renowned town hall and social center in Gulu, a city about 250 kilometers north of Uganda’s capital Kampala.

Here, come for parenting tips, a rare trait in most of Uganda.

Take Dolly Akullo who we found at the center for example. She had lived on the streets of Gulu for about 4 years without a job and defined means of survival. Akullo would later conceive and have her first baby at 19 and on the street.

She had left an internally displaced persons camp, one of those set in place for the safety of civilians during the Lord's Resistance Army Insurgency, to come to the city in quest for opportunities.

“I never found a job and ended up on the street where survival is by chance. I met a man who I thought would be with me because our situations are related. When he realized that I was pregnant, he abandoned me,” Akullo says.

Akullu was born in war captivity before her mother moved to an IDP camp. She believes that the father of her child, just like her, was not parented. So she comes to the center for skills and tips on how to properly raise her now two-year-old baby girl.

“We do a training for parents called positive parenting. Most of the participants are ladies, this is because the males always abandon the females who end up taking full responsibility for the children,” says Micheal Ojok, the CEO of Hashtag Gulu, a community-based initiative that rehabilitates children and youths who live and work on the streets.

Akullu’s story is not isolated, there are a bunch of girls who have been abandoned by either parents or partners to the mercy of street life. In this town, they easily identify a low-cost house, where they mobilize themselves and rent it collectively, whereupon they survive together.

After the signing of the peace deal that ended the insurgency, Gulu registered an influx of people who didn't have places to live. Some had been IDP camps and found their lands and communities already occupied by other people.

According to the United Nations, the insurgency is responsible for over 10,000 fatalities, 60,000-100,000 kidnappings of youths, and up to 2.5 million civilian evictions between 1987-2012.

However, one of the protracted effects of the long war on the community is the amplified apprehension to resort to violence.

The violence split families, which left children lurking without anywhere to go.

According to Irene Achio, the organization's administrator, the incorporation of parenting in the rescue of children was out of the broken nature of the family system “to avoid another generation of broken families'.

“Initially, the focus was on the child but along the way as we kept on reintegrating, we realized a family plays a big role. We came to understand that post-war it was clear that when people were living in IDP camps, family structures were distorted. People were looking for survival and not parenting” Iryn elaborates.

The parenting training started this year 2023 and it has excited many, including older people with already established families.

Classes are facilitated by renowned family welfare expert Langa Stephen, who has focused on mindset change, proper parenting, and self-worth.

“A lot of these people have pain; the way they were treated and the way life has treated them … the program also helps to deal with the root cause of the challenges of parenting,” he said.

The classes go for about two months before participants graduate to their home management.

According to Justine Odoi, the Chairperson of Kanyogoga village in Gulu district, the model has helped improve the welfare of children in his community.

“The mobilization is a one-on-one interaction and we consider teenage mothers and fathers, vulnerable people who cannot fend for themselves, especially those living on the streets,” Odoi explains.

One of his community members is Phona Mbabazi who shares that her life and that of her family took a new turn after the parenting classes.

“One day, I kicked my daughter from inside our house and she fell outside and collapsed. We ran to the hospital and she was put on oxygen. After this training, I stopped insulting my children. When I go home, they welcome me, hug me and I sit with them”.

The motive of these trainings is to provide mentorship classes for these parents so that they learn skills, and get off the streets with their children. The name locally given to the people living on the streets is “Agoo”.

There are tremendous testimonies from these training sessions and this can be evidenced by the feedback given by the parents who were part of the mentorship classes.

Many other initiatives are doing the same to see that parents learn a skill and start appropriately supporting their families. Therefore, there is a need for parents to be alive and present in the lives of their children and not just provide for them.

In a nutshell, Kristen Crockett said, “The reality is that most of us communicate the same way that we grew up. That communication style becomes our normal way of dealing with issues, our blueprint for communication. It’s what we know and pass on to our children. We either become our childhood or we make a conscious choice to change it.”