Meet The Fellow

Meet Nabbaale Tracy from Uganda.

Our last (but by no means least) feature for the third cohort is Ms Nabbaale Tracy.

Currently hosted at the Center for Food and Adequate Living Rights (CEFROHT), Tracy is excited to be involved with an organization that uses litigation and research to promote and protect the rights to adequate food, climate and economic justice. She describes her experience as timely, given the nascent stage of her career.

Her passion for the rights of the most vulnerable has seen Tracy challenging Section 56 of the Employment Act of the Laws of Uganda before the constitutional court. This section of the law provides for 60 working days (3 months) as maternity leave which Tracy argues is unfair and unjust to the youngest members of the community. She is moved by the World Health Organization’s recommendation that newborns should be exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months. As such Tracy argues that giving a working mother 3 months leave without any laws or policies to regulate breastfeeding after this maternity leave period; violates the right to life, right to adequate food and the right to health for the newborns. Tracy, who is passionate about advocating for economic, social and cultural rights of every person, believes that for a country to achieve its desired goals, it should first ensure that its population is healthy, and this starts right from birth.

Should Tracy’s prayers be heard, a legal framework that supports working mothers to exclusively breastfeed for the first six months of the newborn’s life will be enacted in Uganda and hopefully inspire the region towards a more progressive framework for working moms and their children. It is Tracy’s dream that her career in human rights law will see her lending a shoulder to the most vulnerable groups to access justice, particularly in pursuance of their social and economic rights.

When this learned sister is not busy at work, she stays glued to her sofa watching the Liverpool FC playing.

Tracy, always remember to do your best “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” — Aristotle

Thank you for following through the work of all 14 fellows of the third cohort of the training programme. We can’t wait to see the outcomes of their projects across the region in the future.

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