Our Story
Northern Uganda’s Acholi subregion carries the weight of more than two decades of conflict, followed by the slow, ongoing pressure of poverty, population growth, and environmental decline. As families have worked to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, forests and farmland have absorbed much of that pressure — cleared for charcoal, cultivated without rest, and stripped of the tree cover that once protected soil and water sources.
Environmental Crew Initiative was founded by people who saw this cycle up close in Agago District and chose to respond to it directly. Rather than treating conservation and poverty as separate problems, ECI’s founders built an organization around a single idea: communities will protect the environment when they also have a real, practical path to a better life.
ECI’s first activities began in Lira, funded personally by founder Charles Peter Odok using his own savings and support from other founding members, before growing into the organization’s continued work across Agago and Lira today.
