'Sowing Despair':
Climate Crisis Sends Mothers into Depression
Written by:Hellen Kabahukya. Photography by Amos Desmond Wambi
Thursday, October 16, 2025
Forty-five-year-old Lucia Namuge has a tiredness on her face. She has had a heavy day, and carries the weight visibly. Her pale skin and dust-beaten feet betray the exhaustion of a woman who spends her days laboring not in her own garden, but in others, earning seeds as payment. Her own crops failed long ago.
After five months of drought, she planted at the first sign of rain, but the rains turned into floods, drowning her seedlings before they sprouted. Now her small garden is bare, the little maize left riddled with pests.
“That is all I have left, and now it’s been eaten away by pests, the chances of them making it is so little,” she painfully says, pointing at the 15 – 20 maize stalks barely sprouting.
Just outside her beautifully stick woven fence (Manyata) —a cultural sight for every homestead— is completely dry land. The fields are bare and sections of it have been dug again in hopes for the rain, but a month later with no sign of rain.
As I walk through the dug-out parts, the soil pierces through my shoes. It’s like walking on hot rocks, but Lucia strolled through like she was walking on a carpet. Her feet are home.
This is not the weather she was taught to read as a child, and every time she thinks she has it right, it changes.
“This is the fifth consecutive year I have lost everything,” Lucia says, her eyes fixed on the pest-bitten leaves. “I took a loan to buy seedlings and it all died, I yielded nothing. How do I pay it back?” Lucia says, barely making eye contact, the focus pierced on the maize as if searching for answers in the very ground that swallowed all her hope.
Lucia Namuge speaks to reporter Hellen Kabahukya during an interview outside her home. Photo by Amos Desmond Wambi.
In despair she admits that she has often thought of ending her life, It’s not the first time.
Her woes began five years earlier, when yet another cycle of drought hit Karamoja. With the grass gone and watering holes dried up, her husband, like other men in the region, walked the animals for miles each day in search of pasture. With limited water and pasture they grew weaker and thinner and many collapsed along the way, calves perishing first, followed by older cows that could no longer withstand the hunger and heat.
Yet what the drought spared, the raiders soon claimed. Armed young men from neighboring villages attacked him in his kraal, driving off the few surviving cattle. These raids, an old and common practice in pastoralist communities like Karamoja and across the borders with Kenya and South Sudan have turned increasingly violent in recent decades.
Once viewed as a way for young men to prove courage or recover losses after drought, raids today are fueled by assault rifles and desperation. For Lucia’s husband, the raid meant losing the last of his herd, and with it, the family’s lifeline.
Worse still, when her husband returned to their homestead in Kotido after losing all the cattle, he came back weakened and coughing. The long treks in search of pasture had left him exhausted, and soon he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
With no herd left to sell, no income to buy medicine, and barely any food to feed him,and his family, his health deteriorated quickly. Within just a year of his return, he passed away.
With no income, no oxen to dig, and 12 children to care for, she found herself contemplating an end. “I was always stressed and over thinking, with my husband’s death every responsibility was mine to bear alone, it takes a toll on you,”
Over time, most of her children then aged 21-16 started to leave, some to work, some married early, and others disappeared into city labor. She remains with only three. “I carry such a burden, how can a mother fail to take care of her own children, how can I blame them for running away,” She says while struggling to keep the tears away, there is a long pause before she heavily sighs and adds,” Sometimes I questioned why I am still alive, it’s not worth it,”
Now left with three children, she still struggles and yet the weather still doesn’t relent.
“You cultivate, it comes for a month, the heat destroys it or it pours down and the flood washes away everything,” She gears from frustration, adding,
“Sometimes we go to the bush to look for greens, if we make money we get silver fish and maize flour because every sauce compliments it, but if I am being honest, that’s rare and we have to rely on the wild greens solely,”
A mother carries wood used as cooking fuel. Photo by Amos Desmond Wambi.
The alternative is now to move two to three towns over to look for daily work in exchange for money or be paid in kind either seeds or food.
“I walk distances collecting fire wood or I work in other people’s gardens to make a living but the money can barely buy anything, at most you’re earning 2,000 shillings on a good day 5,000,”
Lucia’s despair is not unusual. Each failed season drives farmers deeper into debt and despair. Suicide becomes, for some, an escape from the relentless cycle of hunger, debt, and shame.
According to the Word Health Organization suicide is the fourth leading cause of death in the 15-29 years old population. For every suicide, there are likely 20 others who attempt suicide and many more who have serious suicidal thoughts.
The data in Uganda tells a quieter story, the country has been grappling with a troubling rise in suicides. According to Macrotrends data, the suicide rate in Uganda for 2021 was 5.5 per 100,000 people, a 11.56% increase from 2020. Though lower than some global averages, this rise signals a crisis.
“Most of the cases we see in rural areas are tied to economic failure,” explains Grace Apio, a Nurse at Komoru Health Center in Kotido. “When a season fails, when debts pile, people feel they have no way out and suicide is rarely discussed openly, it is buried under shame.”
Media reports often attribute Uganda’s rising suicide cases to poverty, particularly in rural areas. Yet in these communities, poverty is not just the absence of money– it is the absence of options. It means walking miles to fetch water, selling the last goat to buy medicine, or borrowing money for seeds that floods will wash away.
Uganda’s poverty is complex. According to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, nearly 61 percent of rural households survive on subsistence farming and therefore livelihood is tied to seasons and weather patterns that no longer follow the rhythms their parents once relied on. The World Bank notes that although Uganda’s national poverty rate has fallen over the last two decades, rural poverty remains stubborn, driven deeper by repeated climate shocks.
“You cannot understand mental health without considering a person’s environment. In farming communities, it is essential to examine their surroundings to identify the triggers, because a person’s mental well-being is shaped by the world they live in.” Dr. Daniel Kanamara a Psychotherapist explains.
Sometimes, one moment decides everything.
When 45-year-old Okum (not his real name) took his own life in 2023, after floods cut off the road and left his entire harvest of tomatoes to rot, some in the village pointed fingers at the bank and the broken road. Others said it was his fault—that he had been too weak., How could he choose the easy way out?
Now his family doesn’t talk about it. The neighbors still whisper.
“This man invested over 15 million into those tomatoes, he had taken a loan from the bank. Sadly on his way to South Sudan, it rained for days on end and the water cut off the roads. They were impassable,” Ojok tells the story.
Tomatoes being perishable goods, they rot, and he lost all of them. Right there at the road, he ended his life.
Suicide includes a progression from ideation, planning, attempts, to eventual death. While more women attempt suicide or experience suicidal thoughts, more men die by suicide due to using more lethal methods. Tragically the ration of men to women that commit suicide is 3:1 where men struggle with silent battles of depression.
“I hear of these cases more than I can count,” says Peter Longora,the LC1 chairperson Komoru. “People come to me when loans have failed, when families have broken apart. We talk, but without services, without support, sometimes they go back and still end their lives. We are left helpless.”
These tragedies are becoming increasingly common across Uganda and East Africa, where climate shocks collide with economic precarity and mental health remains barely a whisper.
For years, Uganda has been experiencing a range of climate-related challenges, including extreme weather events such as floods, prolonged droughts, and unpredictable rainfall patterns.
These environmental changes have far-reaching implications, particularly for rural communities that rely heavily on agriculture.
As crops fail and livestock perish, many families face food insecurity, loss of income, and displacement.
According to a StrongMinds report, depression in rural communities like Kotido, is closely linked to droughts, flooding, and erratic rains that disrupt food security and livelihoods.
Agricultural and Pastoral communities like Kotido are very susceptible to depression and anxiety because produce and livestock represent the biggest part of their lives and so the loss of that is a big life change which can cause one to lose hope in life,” Specioza Kifunga Nawal a researcher and programs officer at strong minds Uganda explains.
In East Africa, similar tragedies play out. Kenya has witnessed spikes in farmer suicides during prolonged droughts, while Tanzania struggles with rising cases of youth suicide amid joblessness and crop failures. South Sudan and Ethiopia, scarred by floods and conflict, also report increased mental distress linked to displacement and food insecurity. These regional struggles mirror Uganda’s: climate shocks amplify poverty, and poverty, in turn, fuels despair.
Globally, the burden is staggering. The World Health Organization estimates that over 700,000 people die by suicide each year. While high-income countries often record higher suicide rates per capita, low- and middle-income countries, including Uganda, account for nearly 77% of all global suicides.
Within this global context, Africa stands out not only because it suffers the highest regional suicide rate, about 11 per 100,000 people, exceeding the global average of nine. Also six of the ten countries with the world’s highest rates are African.
Mental health response still a far cry
In climate-vulnerable nations such as India, thousands of farmers take their own lives annually after crop failures. In Australia, prolonged droughts have been linked to higher depression and suicide rates among farmers. Uganda’s struggles, therefore, sit within a wider global pattern.
Yet even as climate shocks and poverty fuel despair, the mental health response in Uganda remains painfully inadequate, especially in rural areas.
According to the Ministry of Health, over 14 million Ugandans live with some form of mental disorder, yet fewer than 1 percent ever receive treatment. The country has fewer than 50 psychiatrists for a population of 45 million, most of them based in urban centers.
For rural families, access to professional help is almost impossible.
Dr. Hafsa Lukwata, Assistant Commissioner for Mental Health at the Ministry of Health, acknowledges the challenge, pointing out that mental health still takes up less than 1 percent of the total health budget, a figure significantly below the World Health Organization’s recommended 5%.
This severe underfunding leaves millions without treatment and strains resources, particularly outside the capital city of Kampala where the Butabika National Referral Hospital, the country’s only specialized psychiatric facility, is located.
“We have and are still pushing and calling for a budget increase to at least 5 percent, to enable broader coverage and to support mental health services in more districts because even that 1% majorly covers Butabiika Hospital and its costs,”
She emphasizes that decentralization is part of the plan. In various policy discussions and interviews, she has argued that mental health services must be pushed down to Health Center III and IV levels, and even lower, so counselling, screening, and referral systems are available closer to people’s homes. Implementation has been slow, she admits, because many districts still do not have the staff, the funding, or the structural support to carry out the new mental health staffing structures.
“We know mental health is an urgent public health issue, but services are thin, and stigma remains very high. For many in rural Uganda, help is either too far away or completely unavailable.”
Grace Apio, the nurse at Komoru Health Centre III, says most of the cases she sees are not about malaria or injuries but silent battles, “We receive many patients who complain of headaches, chest pain, or lack of sleep. But when we probe further, it’s stress and depression…”
As a health officer trained by strong minds on how to screen and identify issues like depression and anxiety, she easily points it out to many; however, she admits that most facilities lack even basic counseling services. Patients often come with physical complaints, only for deeper psychological struggles to remain hidden. “When we do identify cases, there’s very little follow-up because referrals are far, transport is costly, and patients often give up,” she explains.
This service gap is not unique to Uganda. Across Africa, the World Health Organization estimates there is only one psychiatrist for every 500,000 people—a ratio 100 times below recommended levels. While countries like Kenya and Tanzania have begun integrating community health workers into mental health response, most programs remain underfunded and limited in reach.
As Uganda grapples with the dual crises of climate change and rising suicides, the lack of accessible mental health care means that despair often festers in silence. The StrongMinds case study from Kotido makes clear that unless climate adaptation is paired with scaled-up mental health services, more lives risk being lost not just to hunger or floods, but to hopelessness itself.
For Lucia, survival is a daily negotiation between despair and duty. She walks miles for firewood, labors in other people’s gardens, and accepts a handful of seeds as payment. Yet at dusk, when she watches her three children eat the little she has managed to find, For now with the encouragement from the group therapy she attends every week, she stays– if not for herself, then for them.
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