Bride Price, Poverty and Domestic Violence in Uganda

This ten-page executive summary outlines the key findings from a research study on bride price, poverty, and domestic violence in Uganda. The research was conducted as a response to both the growing interest in the practices of bride-price and to moves for its reform in Uganda and other countries in Africa. The study was undertaken through a collaboration between MIFUMI, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) and women's rights agency based in Uganda, and two United Kingdom-based research groups, the Violence Against Women Research Group, University of Bristol, and the Centre for the Study of Safety and Well-being, University of Warwick. The study found a mix of positive and negative impacts of bride price on individuals, families and communities, with negatives outnumbering the positives, and mainly negatives in terms of development.

The objectives of the research were to investigate, through action research, the impacts of bride price on the capabilities of women, children, and families in terms of development, quality of life, health, decision-making, and community participation; explore possible interrelations between bride price and poverty, as well as domestic violence; develop policy recommendations; and develop a local action-oriented dissemination plan, including a collaborative community awareness-raising programme. The project was built on the belief that research in rural African contexts cannot be imposed but should be developed in collaboration with local people. The research adopted a participatory action research methodology, understood as research which feeds into, and leads to social change in a dynamic process consisting of focussed cycles of planning, action, and reflection. A key part of the approach used was the recruitment of 13 local community-based researchers (two-thirds of whom had no connections with MIFUMI) who engaged in a participative training process with the researchers, and conducted interviews with women, men, young people, and duty bearers.

Overall, from all the data sets, 65% of interviewees suggested that bride price has mainly negative impacts and almost 35% suggested that there were both negative and positive impacts, while those suggesting mainly positive impacts were less than 1%. The study found that bride price was linked to gender inequality, early or forced marriage, and landlessness and homelessness for women. While both domestic violence and entrenched poverty were identified as overriding issues, the study found that bride price made them worse. Some connections were also identified with increased HIV infection.

Bride price and domestic violence
The principal ways in which bride price was seen to cause domestic violence were identified as follows:

• Domestic violence occurs because the man often feels he "owns" the woman and, if the wife does not obey the husband, he may feel entitled to punish or chastise her. Men may also not have respect for their wives due to the payment made and engage in domestic violence as a matter of course.
• If a wife leaves due to domestic violence or marriage problems, her family often cannot repay the bride price and thus cannot take her back. The woman is frequently forced to stay in or return to the violent marriage.
• While domestic abuse is widespread in many communities, bride price itself appears to increase the types of abuse that women experience and the reasons why violence occurs. It cements women’s inequality and the likelihood of men feeling that they have a right to dominate and control their wives, including through the use of violence.

Bride price and poverty
The study also suggests that there is a link between bride price and poverty. A large majority of interviewees from all data-sets pointed to examples of bride price contributing to poverty. Approximately 82.4% of interviewees believed there was a connection between poverty and bride price, with 12% believing there was not. Interviewees believed the overall problem to be that of entrenched poverty, but bride price is often a factor in increasing it. Thus while the over-riding issue is one of challenging poverty itself, work on bride price is one part of this larger task.

Bride price and HIV
The study also suggests a variety of ways in which bride price may contribute to increased HIV infection:

• Older men able to pay good bride price may be HIV+. Cases were presented of parents who had sought wealthy older men for their young daughters where such men may have been infected with HIV and also might have other wives, thus spreading infection.
• Women forced to stay with unfaithful husbands because parents could not repay the brideprice, where the husbands became HIV+ and then infected their wives (and children) who would otherwise have left.
• After husbands died of HIV/AIDS-related illness, brothers often sold the land and the wives were driven away or forced to marry again for economic support and HIV/AIDS was spread.

The research findings revealed that reform to remove the harmful aspects of bride price, or abolition, were recommended as the way forward in the data-set of interviews with members of the public. Among the professional and expert interviews, overwhelmingly, reform to make it a non-refundable gift and a small token of appreciation was favoured. With respect to long-term development, cultural change and public awareness-raising, the need for community education and for sensitisation work among local people in villages was highlighted by the majority of the interviewees. This was reinforced by the participants at the two Round-table events held in Tororo and Kampala.

The study reports that although bride price was seen as an important cultural tradition, respondents in the study suggested that the practice required reform. Five main routes for reform emerged from the findings. These include:

• legislative reform at national level;
• policy reform through government initiatives and civil society;
• legislative reform at local level;
• educational initiatives in the education system; and
• community awareness-raising and sensitisation.

In taking forward the strategies for action identified by the research, a programme of training for community sensitisation work was carried out with a team of community development workers, women's educators, activists, and support workers from women's forums and projects at village level. A Community Sensitisation Model to facilitate grassroots work was developed which authors say enables the collaborative development of relevant local strategies of action.

According to the report, a community education and sensitisation programme that responds to the research will be devised and implemented by MIFUMI which will include radio broadcasts, community awareness through sensitisation meetings at the village level, and the production and distribution of leaflets. Through these methods, it is hoped that awareness of bride price issues will be increased at the community level.

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