Today, Sunday, 11th June 2023, at 2:00 p.m., the remains of senior change agent Joseph Mugisha Bitature will be laid their final resting place at his home in Nsiika Town Council in Buwheju District. I received the sad news yesterday from the Executive Director of the Uganda Change Agent Association, Ms. Lucy Akello, that Bitature had rested.

According to his loved ones, Bitature had been battling lung cancer for a while and was undergoing chemotherapy.

“He had seemingly come out of the most difficult stages. Unfortunately, last week he went off the radar and has been at the Cancer Institute where he succumbed to death on Thursday, 8th June 2023.

Joseph fought a good war, not just a fight. He will be greatly missed.”

Family and friends of the late Joseph Bitature Mugisha

A trying time it is for his loved ones. I pray God strengthen them to mourn and to find the courage to celebrate Bitature’s life here on earth.

Since I heard of it, I am battling with emotion. Memories of him in the early 1990s keep flashing in my thoughts. You see, fresh out of graduation, in 1992, I was hired by Stan Burkey, to work as an administrator of the Change Agent Training Programme under Quaker Service Norway. It is there I found and first met Bitature.

The fruits of our work with the CAT Programme include the Uganda Change Agent Association; an association with a membership of thousands of grassroots change agents all over Uganda. Under the CAT Programme, Bitature trained hundreds of change agents and trainers of trainers in self-reliant participatory development. And those whom he trained, trained others and the multiplier effect continues.

Bitature and I were the first full-time paid employees of the Uganda Change Agent Association, both seconded by Quaker Service Norway. He as the head of programmes and I as the head of administration and fundraising. And so, in every way Bitature was instrumental in the formation and nurturing of the Uganda Change Agent Association.

For decades, he selflessly gave of himself and made a contribution of empowering Ugandan people through his work with the CAT Programme and Uganda Change Agent Association. He invested in the people of Uganda and standards of living of thousands of rural households have been positively transformed through his work as a senior change agent.

He has gone too soon, but he has left an impressive legacy of thousands upon thousands of positively transformed change agents and their rural households. Yes, Bitature fought a good war as well against poverty in Uganda.

It was a privilege to have journeyed with him, working alongside him under the CAT Programme; and as a fellow development executive within the civil society sector of Uganda. At the time of his death he was working with HelpAge International.

May Bitature’s humble soul find eternal rest I pray.

By Ms. Norah Owaraga, Managing Director of CPAR Uganda Ltd