On a muddy, uneven and unnamed road on the outskirts of the eastern city of Jinja, children laugh and play in a compound surrounded by green hills and sugarcane plantations.

A child hurtles his wheelchair down the driveway at breakneck speed towards a heavy gate manned by a friendly security guard. On the worn concrete veranda, a young boy with hydrocephalus - a condition in which fluid enlarges the skull - laughs loudly as he plays checkers with two friends.

The cheerful atmosphere belies the difficult backgrounds of the 98 children - aged six months to 18 years - who live on the compound. All were abandoned. Most were babies when their parents left them. Some were left at the compound gate, others at hospital after they were born while one three-year-old boy was rescued from his home days after his parents disappeared.

Today, more than six million people in Uganda, a country of nearly 50 million, live with a disability. Many consider disability to be a burden due to a long-held cultural belief that it is a curse.

Families with disabilities are often shunned by their communities and, in the absence of support or knowledge of better practices, often resort to restraint, tethering and forced seclusion. In some cases, children are abandoned due to social stigma and financial hardship. About 31 percent of households with a disability live in poverty.

Just 1 percent of the country’s health budget goes towards helping these families. “A meagre amount,” says Andrew Mubangizi, assistant commissioner for disability. In rural areas in particular, a lack of staffing and resources at government-run clinics means caregivers often have to travel long distances to access support.

However, for the past two decades, small, donor-funded organisations and charities dotted around the country have tried to fill the void left by the health system to care and advocate for those living with disabilities.

One of the people leading the movement is Edith Lukabwe, who is raising the 98 children at her Home of Hope orphanage. She hopes that educating small pockets of her local community to raise awareness will balloon into a more accepting society. “[People] can then teach their communities. … There shouldn't be a cultural stigma,” she says.

On a humid, late afternoon in November, Edith sits giggling loudly and bantering with two older members of her team during a lull between heavy rain showers. They watch as younger staff members dodge puddles and sweat through a daily aerobics routine in the muddy courtyard.

As energetic pop music blares across the compound made up of three single- and double-storey buildings, seven-year-old Diego, who has cerebral palsy, heads up a concrete ramp towards a therapy room. His wrists twisted, he crawls forward slowly until Edith spots him.

“Diego, my boy!” the 49-year-old calls out with a wide grin.

She runs over to him, her loose dress billowing as she scoops him up and swings him quickly onto her hip. He gives her a high five, and the two laugh before turning their attention to the workout.

The warmth and affection between Edith and her staff and the children at the orphanage make the place feel like it belongs to a very large family.

Edith’s own journey as a disability rights figure in Uganda began in 2000 with the birth of her first child, Derrick, in Jinja.

When Derrick was two days old, he turned yellow and cried excessively. So Edith and her husband, Richard, took him to a hospital where he was misdiagnosed with malaria. For two weeks, their son suffered convulsions, and upon seeing another doctor, he was found to have complications with his spinal cord after contracting meningitis.

“When he made three months, this is when I realised that my son was not growing as a normal child. He had poor head control. He had a curved spinal cord. He was very floppy,” Edith recalls while sitting in her office. Its walls are adorned with certificates of appreciation and merit, and a portrait of President Yoweri Museveni hangs above the door.

As she looks out a window onto a playground full of children, Edith recalls how she and Richard struggled to get information about their son’s condition and were ostracised by their friends and family who were fearful of them and Derrick.

“We started coming into the hospital, in and out. Home, hospital, home, hospital. And with his situation, especially with convulsions, people were like, ‘He has got epilepsy. He has demons.’ And this is where I was rejected by the community,” she says.

“They were like, ‘She gave birth to a demon-possessed child.’”

Historically and until today, education about disabilities has not been promoted through government-run schools or local clinics, leading many Ugandans to resort to traditional healing. Without a diagnosis and feeling helpless, Edith succumbed to social pressure and took her son to traditional healers.

“I tried to take him to different witch doctors. They were cutting him all over the body, smearing him with their herbs, washing him with blood of the chicken, the blood of the goat. They could take us in at night to shower us with the blood of the chicken, but still, Derrick didn't change,” she recalls. “It was just worsening.”

But then an elderly couple at her church encouraged her to return to the hospital and supported her family. So Edith returned with Derrick to the hospital. After 12 months, he was diagnosed with permanent disability. The prolonged lack of treatment for meningitis had led to severe brain damage and cerebral palsy, leaving him nonverbal and unable to walk or feed himself for the rest of his life.

Hoping to help with Derrick’s lack of mobility, Edith started attending a physical therapy session with him at the local government hospital.

There she met other mothers and grandmothers who brought their children with different disabilities. She was shocked to see how malnourished some of them were.

Edith took note of the techniques the therapists and the nurses were using. The nurses taught her how to better care for Derrick. They showed her how to mash his food so he could swallow more easily, for example. Meanwhile, Edith befriended the other women who attended and with her newfound knowledge began offering to help them with small tasks, like cutting their children’s nails.

“Mama, can I help to cut off these nails?” she recalls asking them, explaining that because they were long the child could injure themself.

Grateful, the women started to bring her food whenever they came to the hospital. “So we became such friends. So I started visiting them once in a week,” Edith recounts.

Although she suspected neglect was behind some of the children’s poor states, she was shocked when she visited the homes and saw how some were being locked inside - a consequence of stigma, a lack of support and education, and poverty.

“It broke my heart that every time I was going to visit the grandma, I found this child locked in the house. The child has been there for the whole day,” she explains. “That's the moment I knew I wanted to help.”

Edith began an informal support group at the hospital where she and others attending the therapy sessions would pool together money, usually about 1,000 Ugandan shillings ($0.30), and give it to someone among them who needed it most. Meanwhile, the therapists working with Derrick and the other children moved them to a local charity. After seeing Edith’s work, the charity offered her a job visiting the parents of children with disabilities to provide support and therapy.

But the work was unpaid, and she and Richard now had two more children alongside a three-year-old Derrick to raise on just one salary. Edith soon quit. About that time, she had a car accident that left her with a spinal cord fracture and an open head injury. “I ended up in the hospital, in Jinja hospital, for a year,” she says.

Richard was left to care for the children, which left less time for work. This period was very difficult on her family and marriage, Edith says, but she resolved to push through.

“After six months at home, I was able to begin putting my assistive devices down, and I started walking,” she recalls.

“I say to God that if you heal me, I'll take care of the disabled children.”

As she recovered, she would spend the day on the porch of her family’s rented home, often seated in a wooden chair, to look after Derrick. Wanting to help the families she had assisted before her accident, Edith asked her cousin to bring the children to her home. Within a month, she was caring for six children, including her son.

Soon after, two babies were left on her doorstep. She believes they were abandoned due to the taboo surrounding disability and left with her as a result of gossip within the community. “They were like … ‘She's taking care of those children with demons. I think it's the demons which also caused her accident due to her son,’” Edith says with sadness in her voice.

Edith worked with the local village elder to try to locate the abandoned babies’ parents, but their efforts were unsuccessful.

She was then obliged to formalise their adoption. She did this by registering her work as a caregiver at a community-based organisation and orphanage in 2007. The Home of Hope started on the porch of her house, and then in 2013 with the help of international donors, she was able to move her growing organisation - and her family - to the large open compound they are at today.

Edith recalls this as a happy time for her and Derrick. She would take him for walks in his wheelchair outside the compound and remembers how he’d smile brightly at passers-by. Ever since he was born, she had shared a bed with Derrick to watch over him and never stayed away from him for too long because he would cry out for her whenever she left the room. Derrick was “a blessing for the family”, she says.

In 2014, as Edith was now raising four of her own children and a growing number of others at the orphanage, Derrick died of cardiac arrest after a short illness. He was 14.

Derrick’s death devastated Edith. “This is my own womb, my own blood, my own child. I can't even know how to express that. I still have pain. I'm just learning to live with that pain,” she says softly.

The home suffered. “It perished,” she says.

But over time, she started to think about how to channel her grief into her work and expand it in Derrick’s memory.

Edith says she thinks of him during happy times, but also when things are difficult. “In tough times, I feel I wish he was by my side,” she admits.

“Every time I was with him, we could laugh. He could bring that smile. Whenever I was stressed, I could look at him, and he gives me that bright, light smile,” she recalls.

“The love was a really happy memory.”

It is because of Derrick that Edith says she is doing what she does today.

“I don't want this [home] to exist when I'm alive and then when I get out of the world, it dies. I know children with disability will continue to exist,” she explains.

Edith set up a hospital to both honour her son and allow the organisation to be more self-sufficient. Home of Hope is 99 percent funded by international donors, and Edith was able to raise the money to build a fully staffed hospital for the children who live on the compound. It’s also open to the local community.

Richard, who oversees all the maintenance, looks after a chicken hatchery that provides the kitchen with eggs and meat.

The organisation hosts therapy and social work students from Europe as volunteers to supplement the work of the full-time staff. Two of Edith and Richard’s sons also work there: Denis, 24, is the operations director, and Francis, 20, is a nurse.

Most recently, they built an assisted living home in nearby Buwenge for those aged 18 and older who are too old to legally live in the compound.

At the main orphanage, the once bright paint on the walls is faded and shows the strains of time, but it continues to provide warm, comfortable bedrooms with animal decals and bunk beds, three meals a day and children’s activities.

Yet its work stretches beyond the high brick wall surrounding it.

As the staff disperse, panting yet smiling after their workout, a thin, neatly dressed man approaches Edith. He greets the children as he crosses the yard.

Peter Osire is Edith’s right-hand man. In 2013, impressed by his attention to detail and work ethic when approving the charity’s regulatory paperwork in his role at the local council, Edith persuaded him to join her team. Affable yet firm, the 41-year-old is the Home of Hope’s programme coordinator and runs its community outreach programmes.

Covering a 30km (19-mile) radius surrounding Jinja, Peter engages local “village mobilisers” to identify children with disabilities living - and often hidden - in villages. Their families are invited to monthly sessions held by a team of social workers, therapists and nurses who not only provide medicine and therapy if needed but also education about disabilities. The hope is they will spread what they learn deeper into their rural, isolated communities.

Recently, Peter met Olivia, a young mother who, after being abandoned by her family and left on her own to care for her son with Down's syndrome, attempted suicide. He also met Moses, a 16-year-old boy with epilepsy whose lack of mobility has left him permanently fixed in a foetal position. Home of Hope has therapists and counsellors who can help them both.

It was at an outreach session where 41-year-old Ruth* approached Peter for help. Ruth is seven months pregnant and raising two girls with cerebral palsy - Jesca*, 13, and Mariam*, 12 - as a single mother. They live in a village that is almost exclusively home to sugarcane workers. The girls’ father abandoned them after Mariam was born, and due to the stigma attached to disabilities, she has received little support from their community.

Like most children with a disability, the girls do not attend school. They help their mother with chores, such as doing the laundry and tending to their small corn crop. When the girls were young, Ruth would take them to canefields for the day, keeping one eye on her daughters as she cut and packed sugarcane. When they were older, she felt comfortable enough to leave them on their own at their small mud house on the village outskirts. But in mid-2024, Ruth says, their 37-year-old neighbour lured Jesca into the fields and raped her. Ruth didn’t suspect anything was wrong until one day when Jesca started refusing to get out of bed. At the local clinic, Jesca was tested for malaria. The test came back negative. But her pregnancy test was positive.

Ruth says she doesn’t know how many times her child was raped. But she learned that her daughter was receiving small amounts of money, 100 shillings ($0.03), regularly, and when pressed on its source, Jesca named their neighbour. Then Jesca took Ruth to the place where she had been assaulted.

When Ruth confronted the neighbour and his family, threatening to go to the police, he admitted his guilt. After a village elder’s mediation, Ruth was assured the family would receive ongoing support once Jesca's baby was born and a bar of soap and 2kg (4.4lb) of sugar every month until the birth. Feeling she had no other option, Ruth agreed. But as Jesca's belly grew, her rapist fled the county. The soap and sugar were never seen.

“This is not justice for my girl. I want him imprisoned,” a frustrated Ruth says, adding that as she has pushed for justice, her neighbours have become hostile. “There is a lot of hatred towards me now.”

With the desperate realisation that soon there would be another two mouths to feed, with Jesca also seven months pregnant, Ruth felt she had to act. But the police weren’t likely to help, she believed, without “facilitation”, or bribes, something she couldn’t afford. So she sought help from the Home of Hope.

When it comes to such cases, however, Edith and Peter are limited in what they can do. Peter has guided Ruth in dealing with the local authorities, but has found the process frustrating.

“The family [of the accused] knows where the man is, though they claim they don't know. But then the police have not yet done any follow-up because they just keep on telling these people, ‘Make sure you look for him and bring him,’” he explains after a meeting with Ruth to discuss the status of the case.

Police respond to requests to speed up the investigation by saying, “We don't have facilitation. Will you facilitate?” Peter adds.

Meanwhile, the police have told Ruth that if she continues to push for charges, she could be arrested on grounds of neglect.

But discrimination is the main hurdle in achieving justice for Jesca, Peter explains. One in four adults living with an intellectual disability in Uganda has been sexually abused, often with no formal or legal recourse for the victim.

Peter has reached out to a legal aid organisation in the hope that its involvement will push the police into action.

Edith is frustrated. The case should have gone straight to the police. But because the child has a disability, no one is taking the case seriously, she says.

“The LC [the local court or village elder] contrived with the family, with the family of the man, and they didn't help because this child is what? Disabled. They see the child as useless,” she says, her voice rising in anger.

Despite the lack of government funding and assistance and systemic and cultural barriers, Edith and Peter are buoyed by small changes.

Weekly therapy sessions are now attended by more than 20 people who bring their children with disabilities. Attendance at monthly outreach sessions held in three subdistricts has also grown. Peter says the first session in 2009 attracted about 20 people. Now 80 to 100 people attend. Both the therapy and outreach sessions are crucial in that they provide primary caregivers with a network to talk to others about their children and experiences.

“In the 20 years that I've run Home of Hope, I've seen change,” Edith says.

“I've seen that parents have started accepting the children [as] they are now. They are no longer getting ashamed of exposing their children to the community. They bring them out, they take them for therapy, they bring them for medication. We are no longer having children who are abandoned on our gates.”

Sitting on the floor of the therapy room, surrounded by immobile children, Edith cradles a toddler with cerebral palsy. She pours porridge into his mouth from a large cup, gently wiping any spills with care, just as she did with Derrick 25 years ago.

“I want them to live happily,” she says. “So long as they are living in this world and I'm also living, I want them to be recognised that they are also human beings.”

*Names have been changed to protect identities