WHY WE EXIST
The belief behind our work
Aid, as it’s built, can often quietly teach people they are helpless — dependent, waiting, their imagination and agency slowly eroded. We refuse that.
We believe creativity can reignite what displacement dampens: the self-belief, imagination and drive for people to author their own change.
“Forum theatre brings us — refugee teenage boys and girls — together to understand our rights, restore lost hope, share experiences, and find possible solutions to the problems affecting us in our communities.”
Habimana · refugee from the DRC and student at COBURWAS Secondary School
OUR MISSION
Every voice matters — and creativity can unlock it. In the face of displacement’s hardest challenges, CAFAR exists to scaffold people-powered solutions, rooted in local wisdom, lived experience and creativity. We give communities the tools to shape their own answers — and the change they build lasts, because they own it.
WHAT WE STAND FOR
Three values, lived through the way we work.
We don’t just say these words — each one shows up in how we actually work.
The people who live a challenge are the ones who should lead the response to it. We build with communities, never for them — and we train leaders from within, so the work belongs to the people it serves.
Community
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People find dignity in leading their own solutions, not in receiving someone else’s. Our work restores agency — treating displaced people as the authors of their recovery, not the passive recipients of aid.
Dignity
Creativity is not decoration; it is a tool for solving real problems and for healing. Through theatre, story, play and art, communities explore what they carry, make sense of it, and build responses that are truly their own.
Creativity
WHY WE EXIST
How CAFAR began
CAFAR was founded in 2023. Simon, one of CAFAR's co-founders, was in Uganda carrying out research with an academic institution when he met Swizen — a youth outreach expert, social worker and theatre-for-development practitioner. Together with Andrew, a physician working at a Kampala hospital, they kept returning to the same problem: the deep and ever-present mental health and psychosocial distress being experienced by refugee youth across Uganda's settlements that was struggling to be met.
Out of that came CAFAR: an organisation using expressive arts, play, sport and embodied cultural practices to support psychosocial wellbeing.
But it was in the doing that the real lesson came. After a number of projects, CAFAR saw that the most meaningful, lasting impact happened when it worked directly with communities — building their input and participation into every part of a project, from design to delivery to ownership. That insight became a method: Creative Action.
Today, CAFAR begins by setting up a community think tank at each site where it works. These think tanks are the starting point for everything — every grant application, every project. From there, CAFAR and the community build the programmes, training manuals and modules together, so that the community can take them on and deliver them effectively, long after CAFAR steps back.
Behind this sits a wide network of practitioners — physicians and medical professionals, psychologists, expressive-arts therapists, creative and narrative specialists, and social workers — working alongside the deepest source of knowledge CAFAR has: the lived experience of the community itself.
WHO WE ARE
A community-led organisation, growing roots across three countries.
CAFAR is a community-led organisation working in refugee settlements in Uganda. When people are displaced, the help they receive is usually planned somewhere else and arrives ready-made. We work the other way round — helping displaced communities design, create and run their own solutions, with creativity as the tool and their own people leading.
The begining
CAFAR began as a local Community-Based Organisation, rooted in the settlements it serves.
A local CBO
Uganda
We became a registered non-governmental organisation in Uganda, operating under the Office of the Prime Minister.
Registered NGO
Canada
We registered as a Not-for-Profit with Canadian charitable status, able to issue official donation receipts.
Charitable status
UK
We are currently working to become a Charitable Incorporated Organisation in the UK.
