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Benon Kayanja
NOVEMBER 2025
NOVEMBER 2025
Dear Friends
Greetings from Uganda, I hope you continue to serve the Lord as our true source of delight and satisfaction. I do highly appreciate you and I'm really grateful for your sacrifice and generosity in the earnest prayers you consistently make for our work in Uganda. It is a blessing to see God's faithfulness through your partnership.
Our work continues to progress really well, especially as we come so close to the end of the year, we need to remember in prayer our staff and friends in Kasese, who days ago went through another ordeal of sporadic attacks from panga wielding people causing fear and panic. We have had to stop our staff from doing any programme related work in the neighbourhoods of Kasese until we are sure the mountains and its neighbourhood areas are secure.
It was so exciting and wonderful to host Gladys Wathanga and Wahome Ndegwa (BMS Head of Programme for Hope for the World and BMS CCM Coordinator for Africa respectively). This was crucial in our missionary work for providing direct support, guidance and operational oversight. This visit greatly equipped us with the right information and expertise to flourish in our demanding roles. Lots of discussions were held with the JLH staff and the board, including discussions around transitioning to sustainable initiatives, our church community mobilisation process (CCM), and generative work. Our CCM trainings in both Kasese and Gulu continue to equip facilitators with Bible studies so as to develop their capacity to trigger holistic change in the JLH strategic areas. Please pray for our CCM facilitators currently being trained to keep focused in becoming change Agents in their localities.
The JLH Gender Mainstreaming work has grown very fast in Kasese and attracted Kasese District Local Government Partnership (KDLG). A Gender Shelter was commissioned and handed to JLH to manage in providing safety, counselling, legal aid and skills training to survivors of GBV. We have more work to do with enhancing cooperation with the cultural set up, empowering the faith-based leaders to use the Bible in fighting GBV as well as starting a Men's movement (because men hold significant power and influence in society and can act as powerful agents of change to challenge the patriarchal norms that are the root causes of violence. Please pray with us as we continue to grapple with these areas of growth.
Menstrual Poverty continues to be a big issue among girls who go to school, especially in both Kasese and Northern Uganda areas. This leads to girls missing school, forcing some of them to use unhygienic materials, or worse, enter into early marriage due to financial hardship and social stigma. We have been praying and thinking about a way to circumvent this and through the BMS Gender Justice Department we received a grant to help set up a social enterprise that would make re-usable pads but also offer free training to school girls. We have already procured the necessary equipment for this initiative and recruited one staff member to help with the production of the re-usable pads. We will be looking at give out the first 300 packages of re-usable pads during the years 16 days of Activism against GBV at the end of November. Please pray for the registration of the social enterprise and its operations to continue successfully in Kasese.
You will recall in my last prayer letter that I requested you to pray for the JLH/CEKCAM grain milling machine. The structure has been built! Praise the Lord! However, we have been slowed down by the electricity company which has not yet connected us to the grid to enable us to run the machine. Please pray for this to be resolved quickly so that it can help improve our farmers agri-produce and incomes.
We thank God for 22 people who accepted Christ as their personal saviour from Masooli Community. Dorothy and I run monthly door to door evangelism outreaches. In September, by the grace of God, we managed to share the gospel. Some of these people have since come to our house fellowship (now we have a name: Ambassadors of Christ) which continues to grow in number and depth in the word. Our sons, Favour and Bright, are both well. They will be starting their holidays at the start of December. It will be a great moment to be reunited as a family during their holiday.
JLH will be celebrating the 16 DAYS OF GBV in Gulu this year, not as an organisation but rather as a body of Civil Society Organisations that are in Gender Mainstreaming. Let's pray for the different activities JLH will be doing in Gulu City; School Debates and Radio Talk Shows.
JLH will be holding a medium term strategic plan review and BMS has been very helpful in helping us to find someone to give JLH on-site support from the BMS People Pool. As the reviewer comes, he will also deliver an AI Workshop on the use of AI in programme design, reporting and decision making to all staff of JLH in Uganda. Please pray for travels between Gulu and Kasese and for the AI training, that it will be successful.
Blessings
Benon