Something is happening in Kampala that has not quite happened before. On the afternoon of Thursday, 1 May 2026, Wellness With Her Club in partnership with Her Working Women, VIBES Popup and Karuna Wellness Studio will open the doors of the Protea Skyz Hotel in Naguru for Her Wellness Experience- Edition One: a curated afternoon gathering designed specifically for women who are ready to invest in themselves.
The event, produced under the various wellness partners and including the wellness strategist and movement professional Rianne Lelia Bateeze, brings together Afro Contemporary movement, an honest panel discussion, and a community of women professionals, entrepreneurs, and creatives for what its organisers describe not as a wellness event, but as a homecoming.
“Women in this city are doing extraordinary things,” says Bateeze. “And we are doing them, in many cases, on empty. Her Wellness Experience exists to change that. It is an afternoon built entirely around the woman who has been putting herself last; and is finally ready to stop.”
“This is not a fitness class. It is not a seminar. It is a room full of women choosing themselves and everything that comes with that choice.”
— Rianne Lelia Bateeze, Founder, Wellness With Her Club
Her Wellness Experience is structured as a full afternoon experience running from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM. It opens with a panel discussion titled Thriving or Surviving: Redefining Wellness for the Working Woman. Moderated by Bateeze, the panel will feature four women whose combined experience spans professional sport, corporate operations, wellness entrepreneurship, and the creative arts. Together, they will go beneath the surface of what wellness actually looks like for women who are building, leading, and living full lives; and who are often doing so at significant personal cost.
Then followed by a signature Wato Movement workshop; an African Contemporary dance fitness session facilitated by Bateeze herself, designed to be accessible to all fitness levels and rooted in African rhythm and wellness tradition. The workshop is not about performance or discipline. It is about return. To the body, to rhythm, to the kind of collective movement that has always been one of Africa’s oldest healing practices.
Attendees will also have access to a curated community experience and market place featuring top wellness brands designed to facilitate genuine connection not the networking kind, but the kind that makes women feel less alone in what they are carrying.
The Wellness vendors
The Voices on the Panel
The panel for Edition One brings together four women whose stories represent the breadth and complexity of what the working woman’s wellness journey actually looks like.
Peace Busingye Oterkus is a professional volleyballer competing for KCB Club and a Sports Science Management professional at Skyz Gym. A proud wife and mother of one, she brings to the panel the particular insight of someone who understands the body scientifically and still struggles to give it what it needs; a contradiction, she has said, that is more common than it might appear.
Thea Martha Bateeze is the Chief Operating Officer of Wellness With Her Club and a corporate professional navigating the dual demands of a day job and a mission-driven organisation. Her perspective on what it means to build something alongside someone you love; and to stay well inside that relationship; is one the panel is unlikely to leave unexplored.
Payal Gori is the founder of Karuna Wellness Studio and co-founder of Hungry Lulu and Karuna Lifestyle. A biotechnologist and genetic engineer with a Master’s degree in Molecular Biology, she worked as a scientist before moving to Uganda and building a wellness ecosystem rooted in yoga and Pilates. Her journey from research laboratory to wellness studio is, by any measure, one of the more compelling stories in Kampala’s wellness space.
Vini Mercy is a visual artist working in paint and drawing, a singer, and a representative of the Vibes PopUp. She brings the creative woman’s voice to a conversation that might otherwise centre solely on professional and corporate experience; and with it, an unflinching perspective on the particular kind of burnout that comes when your passion is also your work.
“Caring for your body is not an indulgence. It is the foundation for how you lead, create, and show up in the world.”
— Rianne Lelia Bateeze, Founder, Wellness With Her Club
Rooted in African Wellness Philosophy
What distinguishes Her Wellness Experience from the growing number of wellness events appearing across East African cities is not its format but its foundation. Wellness With Her Club was built on the conviction that genuine wellness for African women cannot be achieved by importing frameworks designed elsewhere and applying them wholesale to different bodies, different histories, and different cultural contexts.
Wato Movement; the dance fitness and wellness programme at the heart of the club, launched on International Women’s Day 2024, is itself an expression of this philosophy. Its name carries a dual meaning: the Lusoga/Luganda word for waist, and the acronym Wellness Aiding Total Ownership. Its practice is grounded in Afro Contemporary movement: rhythm-based, culturally rooted, and accessible to any woman regardless of fitness background or experience.
The panel discussion, similarly, is designed to go where most wellness conversations do not; into the cultural inheritances that shape how African women relate to rest, to ambition, to their own bodies, and to the idea that they are allowed to thrive. The question of whether mainstream wellness was ever built for women like the ones in that room is one the event intends to ask directly and without deflection.
Her Wellness Experience Edition One is supported by Karuna Wellness Studio, which is providing the yoga mats for the Wato Movement workshop, Her Working Women, a community that puts at the forefront of its mission women empowerment and financial literacy, Vibes PopUp, a curator inspired collective that contributes to small and growing markets by curating market days and vendor promotion spaces as well as Protea Skyz.
This is a partnership that reflects a shared commitment between some of Kampala’s most intentional wellness spaces to make embodied wellness accessible, communal, and culturally honest.
The event also represents a significant milestone for Wato Movement as an organisation. With a growing community of women, an active corporate wellness programme in development, Her Wellness Experience is the public culmination of months of internal building; of systems, of team, of the infrastructure required to turn a vision into something lasting.
The organisers of Her Wellness Experience are clear about who this event is for. It is for the woman who has been running on empty and calling it dedication. For the woman who knows she should rest but cannot quite give herself permission. For the woman who has achieved extraordinary things and still does not feel entirely well. For the woman who has been waiting for a room where she can be honest about all of that.
“We are not asking women to perform wellness or to show up with answers,” says Bateeze. “We are asking them to show up as they are. Whatever that looks like on the day. That is enough. That is the whole point.”
Her Wellness Experience: Edition One takes place on Thursday, 1 May 2026, from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM at the Protea Skyz Hotel, Naguru, Kampala. Dress is workout wear. Spaces are limited.
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EVENT DETAILS
Event
Her Wellness Experience — Edition One
Produced by
Wellness With Her Club | SQY Wellness Foundation Uganda Ltd | Her Working Women | Vibes PopUp | Karuna Wellness Studio | Protea Skyz Hotel
Date
Thursday, 1 May 2026
Time
3:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Venue
Protea Skyz Hotel, Naguru, Kampala
Dress Code
Pink, Purple and white workout gear.
Host
Rianne Lelia Bateeze
Workshop
Wato Movement Workshop- Afro Contemporary Dance Fitness
Panel Topic
Thriving or Surviving — Redefining Wellness for the Working Woman
Panelists
Peace Busingye Oterkus | Thea Martha Bateeze | Payal Gori | Vini Mercy
RSVP & Enquiries
wellnesswithher@gmail.com | wellnesswithherclub.org
About Wellness With Her Club
Wellness With Her Club is a women-centred wellness programme operating under SQY Wellness Foundation Uganda Ltd, founded by Rianne Lelia Bateeze. Through Wato Movement workshops, community experiences, and events like Her Wellness Experience, the club creates spaces where women can move, reflect, and grow together in ways that honour both the body and collective wellbeing. For partnerships, corporate wellness enquiries, and event information: wellnesswithher@gmail.com
© 2026 Wellness With Her Club. All rights reserved.
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