Alice Achan is founder and executive director of CCF, a grassroots NGO based in Pader, northern Uganda which was started in 2002, at the peak of the LRA/Ugandan government conflict. Over twenty years, as many as 20,000 boys and girls were abducted and taken into LRA captivity and over one million people were forced into camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), in shocking conditions.

Alice was a teenager as the violence started in the late 1980s. One of 27 children born to a polygamist father, she was forced out of school numerous times due to the conflict and poverty, and finally finished secondary school in her 20s. Her belief that education was the key to improving her life drove her to study social work, firstly a certificate and later a degree.

In 2002, armed with training in social work, a big heart and a vision for a better future for the women of northern Uganda Alice, began helping facilitate the healing and empowerment of the many hundreds of teenage girls, as young as 12, returning from the conflict, many with babies or pregnant after being sex slaves to the rebel troops.

Alice believed that without healing and counselling the girls could not move on with their lives. She also feared that another generation would suffer if the teenage mothers rejected their babies. The support progressed to opening opportunities for the girls through training in sewing and hospitality, followed by an academic path through Pader Girls Academy (PGA), which opened in early 2008.

Philippa Tyndale is a Sydney-based writer, humanitarian advocate and former journalist.

Most recently, Phillipa and Alice collaborated to write, The School of Restoration, a deeply inspiring story about Alice’s life growing up as a girl in conflict in northern Uganda. The book was released in Australia and New Zealand on March 17 by Allen&Unwin.

Philippa first became passionate about international development in 1996 through the microfinance programs of Opportunity International in Bali. Here, she witnessed the impact of small loans she and her banker husband, Andrew, had arranged to help an impoverished satay seller, a Javanese soup vendor and others, grow their businesses. She has since become involved in work to take street dwellers off the streets of Manila; actively supported groups fighting human trafficking in India and the Philippines; financed and worked in partnership to build a maternal health clinic, a school and community programs in Uganda. Between 2014 and 2019 she was instrumental in developing free digital libraries in impoverished neighbourhoods and schools in PNG, Haiti and Rwanda.

As a long-time supporter and ambassador for Opportunity International, a global microfinance organisation with 6 million micro business clients, Philippa has been involved in fund-raising, events, documentary making, biography, and communications. She has also led insight tours to visit the work in many countries, including the Philippines, India, Uganda and Indonesia, helping to build networks of women who share a passion to engage and support the poor through Opportunity’s programs.

This fireside chat with Talking Sticks Founder, Melanie Greblo, will explore the inspiring change that can be made, the impact of deep collaboration, the radical social impact of investing in women and girls in developing countries, and how two women came together to write a new story for girls in Uganda.