Rural older women's survival in Uganda : implications for social work with older people

Despite the demographic and socio-structural changes in East African countries (EACs), social work with older people still remains a neglected field in social work practice, training, and research. Voices of older women remain marginalised in discourses on ageing and in feminist literature. Utilising a qualitative approach, life story interviews were conducted with 10 older women in South-western Uganda, to explore their subjective ageing experiences. This chapter presents these older women’s stories of their personal suffering and survival despite the cumulative disadvantages experienced owing to their age, gender, socio-economic status, and living in rural communities. As the interviews show, these older women were not passive victims, as they talked of how they devised collective initiatives to ensure their survival, like engaging in cultivation, and by forming older women’s support groups. This chapter argues that social workers working with older people need to listen to their voices to challenge the intergenerational structural disadvantages older women are experiencing and to inform the development of strengths-based interventions.