Ruth Ochieng is a Ugandan peace activist, gender justice advocate, and expert in post conflict transformation. She served as the executive director of Isis Women’s International Cross Cultural Exchange (Isis-WICCE, now WIPC), a Kampala-based women’s resource center that moved from Geneva to Uganda in 1993 to address the root causes of gender-based violence and conflict. She and her team documented cases of sexual violence and pioneered holistic survivor centered programs, integrating medical, psychological, and economic support to help women heal and rebuild their lives. Our contributor, Nina Valenbreder, recently interviewed Ruth about her trajectory to a career in peace building initiatives, lessons she has learned about the role of grandmothers in restoring resilience in post-conflict environments, and the legacy she plans to leave behind.
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TRANSCRIPT
Lynsey Farrell: Welcome to Grandma Magic, a podcast from the Grandmother Collective. We are a nonprofit organization that supports and advocates for a world where a grandmother’s power is seen, cultivated, and activated for positive change. The Grandma Magic podcast is an opportunity to learn more about the unique roles that grandmothers, aunties, and other older women around the world play in advancing positive social development by talking to and learning from grandmother changemakers.
We hope this series inspires you, brings you joy, and helps you recognize the enduring magic and wisdom that comes from grandmothers everywhere. My name is Lynsey Farrell, the co-founder of the Grandmother Collective and host of the podcast. Today, we’re going to do something a little different. Our writer, Nina Valenbreder, recently interviewed Ruth Ochieng.
Ruth Ochieng is a Ugandan peace activist, gender justice advocate, and expert in post-conflict transformation. She served as the executive director of Isis Women’s International Cross Cultural Exchange, a Kampala-based women’s resource center that moved from Geneva to Uganda in 1993 to address the root causes of gender-based violence and conflict.
Under her leadership, Isis-WICCE centered African women’s perspectives in global peacebuilding efforts. Having survived violence herself during Uganda’s civil war, Ruth has dedicated her career to advocating for women who have endured conflict and trauma. She and her team documented cases of sexual violence and pioneered holistic survivor-centered programs, integrating medical, psychological, and economic support to help women heal and rebuild their lives.
Welcome, everyone, to the work being replicated and empowering the women most affected by conflict. We’re so delighted that we’re able to share the summary of this with you as well on Substack. Take a listen.
Nina Valenbreder (Host): So welcome, Ruth. How are you doing today?
Ruth Ochieng: Thank you very much, Nina. Maybe I will need to start by saying I’m so excited to be here to talk about the different work I have been doing, but probably I need to start by saying I was the executive director of Isis-WICCE, but I stepped down in 2016 after working for over 20 years as an executive director of this international women’s organization, which today is called Women International Peace Center.
The name changed because of the rebels who are fighting in Afghanistan and other parts of the Arab world called “ISIS.” We did not want to be associated with the group because of our lovely name, which we got from our founders in 1994. It meant Isis, the goddess, the goddess who really worked so hard for its communities. We sadly had to leave the name just because we did not want to associate ourselves with that.
But who is Ruth Ochieng now? Ruth Ochieng is a grandmother who is retired but not tired, who continues working with women in situations of conflict. And of course, other conflicts that the world seems not to be recognizing as conflicts are defined differently. But as far as women are concerned, these are conflicts, and you can imagine how these senior women have to drive through, have to walk through the intersectionality of these different conflicts in their lives — the conflict of climate change, which still affects them, the conflict of domestic violence, which the world has termed domestic violence, but it is a conflict on women’s bodies.
And of course, the known armed conflict, which again brings a multitude of conflicts on the bodies of women, especially the grandmothers who have seen it all as the survivors, protectors, promoters of peace, and defenders of women’s human rights.
Nina Valenbreder (Host): Thank you so much for that update. Speaking on the breadth of conflict on women and older women, especially those who seem to have this experience through which they carry the conflict kind of through their bodies, would you be able to share a bit about your personal experience with conflict, living in Uganda during the civil war, and maybe how that influenced your work and starting what’s now called the WIPC?
Ruth Ochieng: Well, I’m not going to preempt my book, which is now in the final stage of editing, but conflicts have been with us on this continent as far back as before I even became a grandmother. I’ve gone through a number of conflicts.
For example, here in Uganda in 1966, when I was just finalizing my O level, there was a crisis between the government of Uganda and the kingdom, one of the largest kingdoms in Uganda, of a tribe called Baganda, who take up the central part of Uganda.
As if that was not enough, as I entered university in 1974, there came another violence. That was in 1977 when Idi Amin was the president of Uganda. He was a guy who oppressed anybody who he felt was intelligent and was utilizing education as a way of defending the rights of other people. At the university, we really fought against his dictatorship and saw so much happen to women, who are today old women, as students at the university.
Then in 1978, I was out of university, and there was another regime. There was a group of liberators from Uganda who had run to Tanzania to fight the dictatorship of Idi Amin. In 1978, they entered Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, and I had just given birth to my first child. It was just God’s blessing that I was able to give birth because I started feeling pains while bullets and whatever were being thrown across Kampala.
Luckily, I managed to get into the hospital, and they found out that my child was not sitting properly in the stomach — it was a breech. So I had to go through a cesarean, but just immediately after they removed the baby, they rolled me back into the room. They pushed another mother on the bed to operate on her. She had twins, and sadly for her, she did not make it.
That moment made me ask myself, there must be a reason why I was not the second one. Probably I should have been the second one. But here I was, the first to be operated on, and I survived. My baby survived. So there must be a reason why I went on surviving so many of these crises.
In 1994, Isis-WICCE, now the Women International Peace Center, moved from Geneva to Uganda. I will not go into the details of how and why it moved — that you will find in my book. At the time, I was working with the Minister of Justice as the Attorney General’s librarian. I had just come back from my master’s degree at City University. When I saw the application advertisement, I said, this is my job because it aligned so much with what I had studied in my master’s in communication policy studies.
So I applied, and it took ages. Little did I know that they were debating, wanting to know if they could get a feminist into this job. At that time, I had not even had a clue what a feminist was. It was just the way it was advertised — it aligned with what I had studied and my passion for working with very disadvantaged people, so I applied.
After six months, I was called, and I got the job. This was in 1995, as we were preparing for Beijing. My first trip into feminist thinking was to the Beijing conference. That’s where I opened up to understand a lot about what women were going through. I could not believe in my lifetime that all of this was happening to women’s bodies.
Isis-WICCE had come to the continent to research and engage with African women on issues of women and conflict. It affirmed to us that this was needed. I saw women, from young to as old as 80, talking about conflict and its different dimensions. That was the beginning of my journey of talking, engaging, and advocating for healing the body, mind, and soul of survivors of armed conflicts.
Nina Valenbreder (Host): So, was it then really recognizing how many people were invested in this work and seeing the community that was existing at that time for this kind of work that inspired you?
Ruth Ochieng: What inspired me was my history of going through conflict, but most importantly, the fact that every woman in Beijing, in the workshops I attended, was asking: what happens to women in situations of armed conflict? The few who managed to come there — the stories they were telling — you could not imagine that a human being would do such things to another human being.
That inspired me because, back in Africa, so many countries were in conflict. The majority of women who were talking about their experiences were from before conflict — Sierra Leone, Liberia — let alone my own country, Uganda. All of them were talking about conflict, but it seemed like very few activists at Beijing could really touch on the voices of these women. It seemed to me as if this was the first time most of us were hearing the real testimonies of women who had gone through such crises.
Being a documentalist, I felt that if I didn’t do this, then no one else would. If Isis-WICCE, now Women International Peace Center, moved from Geneva to the continent to amplify African women’s voices — which had been lacking in global documentation — then I took it upon myself as an obligation to ensure that African women’s voices on war and armed conflict became part of the global women’s movement narrative.
Nina Valenbreder (Host): Throughout your trajectory with Isis-WICCE, how did you experience obstacles and resources available for women who are victims of conflict? How have you seen that evolve and change? And if you could give any insights into that process, how do you even identify the key stakeholders? How do you reach out to these communities?
Ruth Ochieng: When we returned from Beijing as the Isis-WICCE team, we were now confident that this was a niche we must drive from now until wars end. And since you know that wars have never ended, yes, Women International Peace Center continues this work.
From my perspective as a communicator, I went to my executive director at the time and said, “We must break this silence of thinking that you can only understand what women are experiencing by reading books.” Knowing that African culture is oral, we could not sit in a documentation center and wait for women to come and write, or to research from what women in Asia or Europe had written, and then write their own stories. That is not the context in Africa.
The only way to bring their voices into the mainstream documentation center — where elite women could read about the experiences of those who never went to school — was to go out to them. That was the only way to ensure their voices were heard.
And, as you know, Nina, the majority of people who suffer in armed conflict are vulnerable, often from rural settings. They have no information. They have no access to alerts about approaching war to flee to safer places. They are poor. They cannot do anything to change their circumstances. So how do you bring their voices to be heard?
The only solution was to go to the communities where these women were experiencing war or had survived it. In Uganda, we worked in central Uganda in a place called Luwero District, northern Uganda, northeastern Uganda, and northwestern Uganda in a district called Kasese.
And Nina, the stories we heard — across all these regions — were as if all these women had been attacked by the same perpetrators. And that started bothering me so much. Why is it that when soldiers and warring factions enter communities, they first attack women’s bodies?
At that time, it didn’t make sense to me. Why do they target women when the people with guns are men? One could argue that they are asking for the whereabouts of their husbands. But even after they got that information, the women were still attacked, still sexually violated, raped, gang-raped, mutilated. I couldn’t understand.
And this bothered us so much. I kept reading, trying to find someone who had written about this so I could understand the underlying reason for targeting women. After 20 years of working in the field, my conclusion was that they knew how strong women were.
Indeed, when we went into these communities, the only people who were still firm, resilient, looking for food, taking leadership, trying to rebuild homes that had been burned, were women. I started adding one plus one. I said, “Okay, maybe they target these women because they are the pillars of the community.” In one of my papers, I wrote that a woman is the temple of the community. And unless you break that temple, you can never break the fighters.
Because fighters — whether rebel groups or government soldiers — when they come to know that their women have been attacked, raped, or gang-raped, they become disillusioned. Some women were gang-raped in front of their own children. Imagine the humiliation.
So after researching conflicts in Uganda, Liberia, Nepal, and linking up with women we trained from Kashmir, I realized that if I kept waiting for post-conflict reconstruction to take place, no single victim would survive. The wounds they had — physical, mental, and psychological — were immense.
You asked how we got resources and identified partners. Nina, sometimes, it is the zeal that drives you.
At that moment, our organization had just received $8,000. We had just finished documenting and speaking to women survivors of the war in Uganda. I told my boss that I was not going to continue the work unless we started healing these women.
And I remember my executive director saying, “Ruth, you are asking for too many things. You want to document? You want to heal? Do one thing at a time.”
I said, “Yes, I have documented, but I cannot keep listening to the same stories over and over — women recounting who raped them, what time it was, what the perpetrator was carrying, what kind of clothes he was wearing. From one district to another, it is not the same man, but they are using the same systematic way of torturing women. There is no point in continuing unless we start healing these women and see if they can become women again.”
I will not go into the details — that you will find in my book. But as an organization, we decided to partner directly with medical professionals.
Why? Because we could not wait for post-conflict reconstruction.
In my experience, when wars end, post-conflict reconstruction never prioritizes women’s bodies. They start with men’s perspectives — rebuilding infrastructure, legal systems, roads, health centers. And while all of that is important, from my perspective — someone who saw women traumatized, in pain, dying — women’s bodies are never seen as a priority.
That’s why we decided to work directly with doctors. And I am glad we did.
There were many challenges. Medical professionals asked us, “How scientific is your research?”
I remember standing up and saying, “I am not going to go back to these women and ask them for yet another scientific story.”
The doctors told me, “You don’t know what you’re putting yourself into. Everybody will come.”
And I said, “As long as some of them can come and get healed, I will be satisfied.”
So we organized medical camps. The challenges were many, but we persevered.
Thank God the medical consultants eventually embraced what we were doing. They realized they were seeing more cases in our camps than they had ever seen in their hospitals. They found out more than what we had told them. Speaking with victims one-on-one, they worked long hours, but it was rewarding.
At the end of a medical intervention, we would see a woman say, “I have not gone to church for 14 years because of my fistula, but now I can go.”
That alone made it worth it.
It was also rewarding to see psychiatrists and psychologists pick up our participatory research and use it to introduce new healing methods in Uganda that might not have existed otherwise.
For me, the most powerful part was seeing young women and old women become human again — taking up their responsibilities and rebuilding their communities, just as they always have.
Nina Valenbreder (Host): And I can imagine, in this intergenerational approach, creating a space for both older and younger women. I feel like this must propagate through communities during times of resilience and community rebuilding — beyond, like you said, just infrastructure.
Ruth Ochieng: That one, I saw more after I stepped down from my work at Isis-WICCE. I was invited by the Stephen Lewis Foundation to support them in doing some M&E among grandmothers and other people who were vulnerable to the scourge of HIV and AIDS.
Specifically, in this case, we were talking about grandmothers who were left with hundreds of children who had lost both parents. You find an old woman, 79 or 80 years old, now the head of a household. And because of the approach the Stephen Lewis Foundation uses — giving them resilience and the power to care — you can’t imagine what these old ladies have done south of the Sahara in Africa.
They are the ones nurturing the young people, educating them on so many aspects. They now have so much knowledge of how HIV and AIDS are contracted. They sit with the children — some of them were affected when they were just caring for their own children. They are able to take them through the process of closure, to help them understand.
And the way they have cared for these children — sending them to school using the very minimal resources they have — some have entered universities, and others are now giving back to the community. I just wish the world would take the approach that the Stephen Lewis Foundation has — putting money where it belongs and seeing what grandmothers have done.
I was humbled. I’m still humbled because, in every country I go to, I see these grandmothers engaging with policymakers. They sit down and tell them, “You are doing things wrong. You can’t approach it that way and expect success.”
They are informing local councils on what should be done so that communities can live happily, be HIV-free, and feed children nutritious meals. These women didn’t go to school, yet they are doing all this.
Across Africa — Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Namibia, Swaziland, South Africa, Lesotho — you name it. Grandmothers are the stars. Unfortunately, our governments have failed to see the power behind grandmothers. And that’s why we are caught in this cycle of conflicts.
These grandmothers have already embraced the issue of climate change. You find them planting seeds. They are telling people not to dig near the rivers.
Nina Valenbreder (Host): The place is escaping me, but wasn’t it the grandmothers who drew up the legal case on climate change just last year?
Ruth Ochieng: Yes! They are doing it literally every day. Sometimes, we don’t get to know about it because the media is so commercialized. It doesn’t tend to reach them.
But I was privileged — thanks to the Stephen Lewis Foundation — to go deep into these villages and sit with grandmothers. They tell you how they have been able to prepare traditional meals for people who are terminally ill, and you see those people recover. They testify.
And for those who were terminally ill, these grandmothers looked after them, brought them back to health. Their CD4 counts went up again. They move, they dance. These grandmothers are doing what young people in our communities cannot do.
That’s why the whole grandmother movement is crucial for the survival of humanity, especially on my continent. Until we recognize the skill and knowledge these senior women have, until we start soliciting funding to bring younger and older women together for intergenerational conversations, we will miss out on their wisdom.
Yes, young people will teach the older ones new things, but the main lessons will come from the elders — their ability to navigate challenges and help younger generations understand how to move forward.
When we started the medical intervention, we had only $8,000. It wasn’t even meant for that — it was for networking around reproductive health. But we reinterpreted reproductive health in the context of what we were seeing on the ground. After that, we were able to get more resources, which took us to Liberia, then South Sudan.
Grandmothers are sitting on power, on knowledge, on resilience. They can truly pass the baton to young people and show them that it is possible.
This world is not for the weak. And patriarchy has never left. Our issues will never move forward easily. There will always be push and pull, push and pull.
As I speak now, I want to remember one of my mentors. A very powerful woman, who just passed on three days ago. Her name was Annie Walker.
Annie Walker was the Executive Director of the Tribune Center in New York. This Australian woman was a force. She pushed the UN Security Council left, right, and center to ensure that African women could go and talk to the Security Council about wars in Africa.
She did it so articulately. She was over 80 when she passed, but she used her pen to make people understand women’s human rights. If I had not met a woman like her as a mentor, I don’t think I would have been able to take all the advocacy work I did in New York under CSW.
We would go to the Women’s Tribune Center, sit with her, and she would mentor us and prepare us before we went to advocate. She was white — she didn’t have to care. But she cared.
Because she believed that women’s issues — whether you are white, Black, yellow, you name it — are the same issues globally. That war affects every woman, not just African women.
She did her work, and we got that opportunity because back then, resources were available. Bilateral organizations, Ford Foundation, Open Society — they were all ready to support the women’s movement. That’s how we managed to link up with women like Annie Walker.
She has left us. But she has left a legacy. And those of us she mentored? We are still continuing.
Nina Valenbreder (Host): Exactly. And you continue to activate other women.
Ruth Ochieng: That’s why I’m saying resources need to be given to women who have organized themselves into movements.
That is the only thing that will save this planet — because women are connected. Women focus on the most vulnerable people.
Look at Gaza. Look at Ukraine. It is the women who are pulling together the people who have nothing left. It is the women who are dying, trying to protect others.
If all the women across the world were resourced to engage like we are engaging now, this world would be different.
But we don’t see the power of a grandmother. Instead, we only see the power of the gun.
And yet, the gun — from 1914 to today — has not brought us any happiness. It hasn’t.
But I have given you my little story. A story that has brought happiness to some women who would have died long ago.
And yet, we are still here. We are still living. We are still helping others.
Nina Valenbreder (Host): And their legacies as well. Like you said, it’s crucial work. So, looking forward, Ruth, what do you hope your own legacy will be for future generations? And what do you look forward to in the upcoming years — both personally, because I know you said you’re a grandmother, so maybe something with your grandchildren, but also professionally in your work?
Ruth Ochieng: As I told you, retiring doesn’t mean I’m tired.
When I stepped down, I met other women who were just as vibrant as I was in the work of women, peace, and security. One of them is Patricia Cooper, who is in Colorado. We met, we talked, we laughed, and from the very beginning, we just connected.
At the time, she had started a women’s regional network in Afghanistan and South Asia. And she said, “Why can’t we start a women’s regional network for peacebuilding in East Africa?”
So, we did.
It is still young, but we are mobilizing young women. We are mobilizing women to understand peace from a broader perspective — engaging them to deconstruct the word conflict and understand that a woman experiences conflict every day, from her own household to the streets of her community.
She is in conflict.
And all these conflicts are ones we need to start working on.
So my legacy has already begun — by nurturing young people in East Africa.
Whoever I meet, in whatever space I am given, I talk about women, peacebuilding, justice, and human rights. I tell them: Don’t just accept the definitions that have been given to us about conflict. Look at your own life. Understand that you are living in conflict, and then start deconstructing those conflicts to find ways to change them.
We are doing this work with minimal resources — mostly online. We meet once a year, bringing together women from Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania to reflect on what we are seeing in our countries. How have we dealt with the challenges we’ve faced?
I have continued documenting the stories of women peace activists in this network, and it is amazing to see the different perspectives of their peace work.
Their work is very different from what the world traditionally calls peacebuilding.
And that excites me. That is the legacy I see.
Right now, I am also involved in Uganda’s Women’s Situation Room.
This is an African-led mechanism that believes we cannot just watch our communities go up in flames every time there is an election.
We created the Women’s Situation Room as a space to engage youth and women in activism — encouraging them to bring peace to their communities.
I’m currently traveling to meet with stakeholders because we have elections next year. We are already organizing, mobilizing, and engaging as many women’s groups as possible.
We are training them in peacebuilding, mediation, conflict resolution, and early warning and response — so that when election day comes, we will have a team of young women and youth, both boys and girls, who can call in and say, “There’s a small fire starting here.”
And because we have a mechanism in place, we will immediately respond — finding out who is responsible and what can be done before a small crisis escalates into a major one.
Lastly, my grandchildren.
I have grandchildren — young, exciting young women. The first three are girls, and I am mentoring them to truly believe in themselves.
The others are still young. I have eight grandchildren — between my son and my daughter.
I feel so much joy and pride when they ask questions and engage with me.
So that, too, will be part of my legacy.
And then, of course, my book.
I hope to find an editor who can take a final look at my scripts. They are ready. Actually, I wanted to talk to you and the grandmothers because, when we met online, one of you mentioned enjoying reading scripts.
It would be exciting for me to get someone to do the final review before the book is published.
Nina Valenbreder (Host): Oh, how exciting! Wow. Okay. This was truly amazing, and I’m so glad I got to speak with you about all of this.
There’s one question we usually start with, but I think it’s also a nice way to end. Do you have any traditions from growing up that, now as a grandmother — and maybe even as a mother — you have passed on to your children or grandchildren?
Ruth Ochieng: Oh, yes. There are quite a number of traditions in Africa.
But I must say, my father was a priest, and when the missionaries came, they told our fathers and grandfathers that the traditions they believed in were satanic.
Because of his new faith, my father really protected us from learning many of the traditional ways.
So, honestly, I must tell you that I got very little from my grandmother.
What I do remember is mostly about behavior — how you act when visitors come to the house, how a young woman sits, how a young woman eats.
Many of these things, today, we would call practices that made women second-class citizens.
For example, in our community, girls were not allowed to eat chicken.
Chicken was only for men.
Eggs, too, were not for women to eat.
So, you found that everything that provided protein — the foods that made you strong — were not given to girls.
At least, in my case, my father’s faith allowed me to break free from that practice.
Yes, I ate chicken! There was no problem.
But my cousins would visit and say, “Oh my God, Ruth eats chicken! That’s wild!”
As for my grandchildren, I have left them to be.
The only things I have taught them are values.
The values of respect.
The values of dignity in all that you do.
The values of appreciating others.
The values of working hard.
The values of being accountable for whatever you do.
The value of not sitting there feeling sorry for yourself.
The value of self-esteem — knowing that you can do anything.
Whenever I see them getting caught up in the pressures of today’s world — which I feel has destroyed some of the values that shaped me — I sit them down, and we have a conversation.
Nina Valenbreder (Host): Thank you so much for your time, Ruth.
I’m sure that The Grandmother Collective and your network will stay in touch. And I’m very excited to see your book when it comes out.
Ruth Ochieng: Yes, I am excited, too!
I have already gone through two rounds of editing. Now it is in the final stage.
I just need someone outside my usual circles to read it, ask questions, critique it — so that by the time it’s published, it will be ready for a global audience.
It’s a book that goes beyond Africa.
Lynsey Farrell: Thank you for joining us for this special episode of Grandma Magic.
We hope you were inspired by today’s conversation with Ruth Ochieng and gained new insights and inspiration for change.
If you’re as passionate as we are about amplifying the voices and wisdom of grandmothers, we invite you to get involved.
Follow The Grandmother Collective on social media to stay connected and discover more stories of changemakers around the world.
You can also participate in our storytelling initiatives.
Submit your own stories for our Substack publication, The Power of Grandmothers, or join our storytelling circles to share your experiences and connect with others in meaningful ways.
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Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
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