In the face of entrenched conflict, climate change, and poverty in rural Uganda, Ojok Okello embarked on a bold mission to create the first sustainable rural city in the country. As the founder and CEO of Okere City, Ojok engages with residents on holistic initiatives from education and healthcare to environmental management and social enterprise. As a 2023-24 Humphrey Fellow in Global Development, Ojok spent the year at Cornell to build on his skills as a community leader, social entrepreneur, and development manager. In this field note, Ojok shares his vision for Okere City and how his time at Cornell has contributed to the next chapter in his career.
What are the big challenges in your career that your work confronts?
To put it simply, my work seeks to tackle the root causes of conflict, rural poverty, and rural-urban migration in Africa. According to the World Bank, 55% of the people in Sub-Saharan African people live in rural areas today. Also, it is in rural Africa where poverty levels are highest with about 400M living below the poverty line. About 79% of the world’s poor live in rural areas today. The poverty rate in rural areas is 17%—more than three times higher than in urban areas (5%). In Africa, human development indicators such as good nutrition, better health and education services, higher literacy rates, and access to functional infrastructure and/or social amenities are significantly better in urban compared to urban areas.
Moreover, climate change is hitting rural Africa hardest and compounding the already existing challenges. Thus, many are being pushed away from the countryside to both escape rural poverty and access urban opportunities, orchestrating one of the fastest rural-to-urban migration episodes in Africa’s history. For instance, in 1950, just 27% lived in African cities. The number grew to 42% in 2021 and is projected to reach 80% by 2050.
How can we improve rural experiences? How can we ensure that villages in Africa emerge out of the hopelessness they find themselves grappling with today? How should we ensure that the countryside emerges as a constructive participant in building a more sustainable and thriving future in Africa? How can the vibrancy and vastness of Africa's youth be turned into a demographic dividend?
These questions kept me awake for a long time as a development practitioner who has been working on multiple development projects in Uganda for more a decade. In 2019, I started Okere City, a community-based development experiment in Okere, a deep rural village in Northern Uganda that was once a war zone.