The situation is even worse in many families, including my relatives whose livelihoods have been in dire need for decades as drought ravages the Karamoja area now almost every year, affecting livestock and small-scale food production.

This has escalated poverty in the region and driven youth, women, and children to resort to charcoal burning from the very few still-surviving trees for sale to support their families. Now, Karamoja, my homeland, is nearly a desert.

Many young people and women who have found the situation very hard for them to withstand have now migrated to towns around the East Africa (Kampala, Nairobi and a few pockets in Tanzania’s Dare Salam and Somaliland). My people are now beggars on streets in these cities and young girls have turned to prostitution as a means of survival.