“Working is not to be able to retire as such, rather it is about making a change for society even as you grow older,” says Richard Ojara, seen here with his wife Imen.
How do you protect your crops from elephants? Richard Ojara, the Country Office Director of NIRAS in Uganda, has a clever solution: beehives.
A farmer in his free time, he planted 25 hectares of commercialised trees on his land near Kidepo Valley National Game Park in Karamoja, but the elephants kept destroying them. He came up with a clever solution though; installing beehives around the woodlots, which had the dual effect of scaring away the elephants while producing honey for the locals to sell.
It’s a lesson he recently carried over to a woodlot-related tender he was recently involved in for NIRAS.
And equally, while Richard is able to apply his practical experience to NIRAS, he brings many learnings especially from private sector development and agriculture projects back to his family business in Karamoja where, in addition to the woodlot, he and his wife, Imen Doreen Loe, own a hotel - 12 hours’ drive from the NIRAS office in Kampala.
Richard’s calm, inviting face turns serious when he explains his reasoning behind his entrepreneurial work, the day-to-day of which Imen mostly runs.
“My wife and I want to give back to the community. We have witnessed so many youth who are idle, who do not have a job or have dropped out of school,” he explains, adding that traditionally the ethnic people of Karimojong do not value education and as a result, many children remain at home either looking after cattle or taking care of household chores.
Especially young girls do not have the chance to educate themselves and are being married off at an early age. In some cases, Richard says this even involves a money transaction, commoditising the women.
“Women are treated like assets and looked at as a source of income, which is very frustrating to see. We want to fill in this gap and provide an education and possibly a job for these women – that is our main motivating factor in running the hotel,” Richard says.
Before joining NIRAS in 2021, Richard worked with various organisations such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), overseeing mostly democracy, governance, and human rights initiative projects.
While not a lawyer by profession – he holds Masters’ degrees in Research and Public Policy as well as Human Rights – he believes access to justice is a foundational right, which is why he has also done pro bono work for the Uganda Christian Lawyers Fraternity making sure that vulnerable people who could not afford a lawyer had access to one.
NIRAS caught his attention after he had worked with us as an external evaluator for NIRAS Sweden AB. He was impressed by the quality and diversity of NIRAS’s work, which spans across a multitude of sectors, and saw it as a great opportunity to develop his skills.
“I was looking for a way to work in multiple sectors because the world is constantly changing and you need knowledge in various areas to stay ahead. You need to be flexible,” he explains.
“That was one of the main reasons I joined NIRAS. Straight away, I met with a wide variety of experts within the company and the diverse work we do. Right now I’m working on a project in the water sector in Uganda and South Sudan. Recently, I started on another project related to solar off-grid energy, which I have never worked on, but I am excited to learn about the topic.”
Richard learned about farming from his father, who worked with cooperatives and sold cotton on the side to pay the schools fees. He was a driving factor in Richard’s youth and Richard always joked that one day he would buy a tractor for his father. The day this prospect became true his father could not believe his eyes, Richard fondly reminisces.
Now that tractor is being used to support the income-generating training he is doing connected to his hotel, The Karamoja Pride Guest House, in Karamoja and the adjoining woodlot. He and his wife partner with different organisations in Karamoja, like Caritas Internationalis, that run training programme for young people on farming and hospitality, targeting especially girls who have dropped out of school.
For Richard, it makes perfect sense to combine his experiences from NIRAS with the entrepreneurial and community work he and his wife are doing.
“A recent project, which NIRAS applied for through the Ministry of Water and Natural Resources, was targeting the development of woodlots on private land, mainly timber poles and other plantation. Through my experience with my own agricultural work I was able to recognise the challenges of the project and could better design the project proposal,” he says.
“It also works the other way around where I have become better at analysing different bids on various deals – for example at the farm. This makes me able to better consider who I do business with.”
On a day-to-day basis, Richard focuses on expanding awareness of the NIRAS brand in Uganda.
“One of the most important things we do is meet with ambassadors of different countries, trying to explain the impact of our work and who the beneficiaries are. We also talk with other players like the German development agency GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) and scout the competition. In reality, we try to gather as much intelligent information as possible,” Richard says.
Recently NIRAS launched a mentorship programme, which Richard Ojara believes is a great idea that will help multiple development consulting employees develop their skills. He himself highlights the guidance he has received from David Shirley, the former Country Director of NIRAS Indonesia.
“He is definitely a mentor. We have had a lot of one-on-one mentoring on how to manage the office, how to be an exceptional country director, how to do business proposal writing, how to multitask. We try to have calls every quarter,” Richard says.
Richard hopes one day he can grow into a bigger role within NIRAS and that, at the end of a long work life, he and his wife dream of retiring in Karamoja. When that time comes around though, it does not mean that they will rest on their laurels. There will be lots to do on the farm and in the hotel, in support of the local community and its youth.
“Working is not to be able to retire as such, rather it is about making a change for society even as you grow older.”
