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Uganda: Why Can't Homesteads Have Enough to Eat?
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The Monitor (Kampala)
22 July 2008
Posted to the web 23 July 2008
Pascal Odoch
In rural Uganda, when a woman takes the food pans (the most commonly used one is usually made from a used fuel drum) to scrub the pan for the next cooking process, usually by 1:00pm and 6:00pm, you see children, all types of domestic birds and animals (chicken, goats, pigs, even ducks) rushing to have a piece of the cramps.
This practice is common in eastern, mid-north and West Nile regions which according to Uganda Bureau of Statistics (2005) show higher human poverty indices than the national average: Uganda 27.69; Rural 59.46; Urban 12.12. All it means is that the homestead, together with the domestic birds and animals don't have much to go around.
Why are homesteads unable to provide enough foodstuffs? The answer rests in limited production for both home consumption and the market (income) of these vital food sources. Take the case of maize value chain.
The maize processor churns out posho/kawunga and the maize bran that constitutes the primary ingredient for poultry feed. If one had access to maize bran, at least such a homestead's business such as poultry keeping would have what could feed them unlike the scavenging they are relegated to.
In other words, the keeping of these domestic birds or animals are for subsistence, not for the market. This triggers rural poverty as the homestead use them for sorting burials or hosting visitors and relatives.
In 2000 the government launched the Medium Term Competitiveness Strategy for the Private Sector (MTCS) as a framework for tackling rigidities facing private sector development and sustained economic growth. In 2006, government went ahead to show more interest in the development of the private sector by releasing the Competitiveness and Investment Climate Strategy (CICS) as a follow-on to the MTCS, this time with competitiveness as a primary focus.
It is critical that patriotic, locally-oriented, independent, and forward-thinking people join hands together to share information, ideas and strategies with the homesteads, while creating a culture driven by a holistic homestead that has enough foodstuffs for both humans and their livestock.
The point is that rural Uganda is the hub of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) which comprise over 90% of Uganda's private sector and play a critical role in accelerating economic growth and reducing poverty through expansion of rural employment, local tax and export revenues, including reducing Uganda's import bill through import substitution.
However the rural SMEs encounter exceptionally enormous bottlenecks that constrain their expansion potential, such as lack of entrepreneurial and managerial guidance - it is largely trial and error stuff! At the local government level, the chronic story is lack of fuel for outreach work. Besides, there are no down-to-earth messengers of development who are able to jointly think with the villagers on approaches to them.
The full exploitation of production (whether agriculture based or cottage industries) for homesteads and further linkages to markets established through strategic partnerships created with the farmer-SMEs will require provision of not only productivity and profitability enhancing strategies and infrastructure but also quality assured sources of technical information. Doing so enables production that caters for consumption for both livestock and humans at home.
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This is where there is a production-prosperity disconnect.
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