As Uganda nonchalantly joined the rest of the world to mark International Sex Worker’s Day, Uganda Network of Sex Worker-led Organization –UNESO held a Mid-Term Strategic Plan review consultative meeting to assess the organization’s performance with the aim of reinforcing a unanimous blueprint that shall inform and guide UNESO’s actions up to the end of its five year strategic plan ending in 2024.

While speaking at the consultative meeting, Daisy Nakato Namakula the Executive Director UNESO said, “This is an opportunity for us to assess our performance for the last two years looking back at where we started, where we are now and where we aspire to be in the next three years. We appreciate the feedback from the sex worker secretariate, sex worker leaders and individuals in all our diversity. We vow to rise to the challenge to dignify sex work as a true service to our constituency.”

According to a statement from UNESO, in the last couple of years the sex worker movement has sadly documented rampant violations committed against sex workers notwithstanding murder. Unfortunately no justice has prevailed giving perpetrators more power to continue violating sex workers.

To this effect UNESO calls for:

1. Review and Repeal all the laws that criminalize sex work to have sex workers recognized as work and decriminalized. This will definitely help to end all forms of violations committed against sex workers.
2. The government of Uganda and implementing partners should invest more in interventions that strengthen mechanisms for preventing and protecting against human rights violations to all without discrimination.
3. Sex worker organizations and other civil society organizations (CSOs) should continue to create human rights awareness for sex workers so as to empower us to be able to demand and achieve our human rights.