The Two Faces of Ugandan Women

Last week, I was invited to attend a workshop on artificial intelligence (AI), a space where experts and professionals discussed how AI is transforming the dynamics of work.

That same morning, just as I was leaving the house, I was stopped by a woman I had never met before. She looked to be in her 40s, with a young baby tied on her back. She asked me, almost pleadingly, if I had clothes she could wash. She explained that she was desperately searching for any kind of work to earn a meal for her children, four of them, the oldest 10 years and the youngest barely four months.

Her story unfolded quickly. She used to sell foodstuffs in the market until she suffered complications during childbirth. After failing to deliver normally, she was rushed for an emergency caesarean section in a government hospital. The surgery, she said, was done so poorly that she developed a severe infection, forcing her into yet another emergency procedure to save her life. She remained in hospital for two months, losing both her hea

Last week, I was invited to attend a workshop on artificial intelligence (AI), a space where experts and professionals discussed how AI is transforming the dynamics of work.

That same morning, just as I was leaving the house, I was stopped by a woman I had never met before.

lth and her small business.

When she returned home, she discovered that her husband had moved on and left her to fend for herself and the children. Now, she survives by washing clothes for strangers and taking odd jobs whenever they come. None of her children is in school. She lives day by day, meal by meal.

I asked if she had considered going back to her village, where the cost of living might be lower. She shook her head and explained that she had sold off her share of land there and that her relatives would not welcome her back with her children. She didn’t even have a working phone to leave me her contact. I gave her a little money for the day’s meal and hurried onto a boda-boda, already late for the workshop.

At the workshop, the contrast hit me. Inside the hotel hall were women in suits and heels,educated, empowered, and successful in their professions. Their discussions circled around the threat of AI to their jobs. They worried that years of education, sacrifice, and professional growth could be undone by machines that never tire, never take maternity leave, and cost a fraction of human labor.

It struck me then: Uganda is a country of two very different kinds of women.

On one hand are the relatively empowered, women who broke barriers to climb into boardrooms, manage companies, and run businesses. On the other are the women at the very margins of survival, the ones whose greatest fear is not AI, but whether they will find a meal that day or the 10,000 shillings needed for a clinic visit.

Beyond the walls of conference rooms, countless women rise each morning not to emails or board meetings, but to fetch water, dig in gardens, or sell roasted maize by the roadside. Their worries are not about technological disruption, but about paying school fees, surviving malaria outbreaks, and affording soap or a kilo of posho. For them, “AI” is not even a word in their vocabulary.

These women, single mothers, widows, young girls forced into early marriage, are invisible to the glossy conversations of the future of work. Yet they are the backbone of Uganda’s resilience, holding families and communities together under unimaginable strain.

The divide is clear. But it is not unbridgeable.

For the empowered, reskilling, digital literacy, and entrepreneurial opportunities in the AI era are urgent. For the marginalized, social protection, quality healthcare, education for girls, and sustainable livelihood programs remain critical. Both pathways must run side by side.

Both groups of women are vital to Uganda’s future. To ignore one is to risk undermining the other. If we are to build an inclusive society, we must recognize that technology and poverty are not separate conversations, they are intertwined realities shaping the lives of Ugandan women today.