National Context

 

Predominant food supply chains in Uganda arise from the distinct agricultural regions throughout the country. After crops are harvested in regions throughout Uganda, they are transported to Kampala, Uganda’s capital city, to be processed and/or sold. Foods that require processing, such as grains, corn, and livestock, are processed/slaughtered, then distributed to markets throughout the city as well as back to the regions from which they came. Other crops are brought directly to about five key markets across the city. Households, restaurants, hotels, and secondary market distributors, all purchase their crops from the same markets, making Kampala’s main food supply chains quite streamlined.

 

Urban and peri-urban agriculture in Uganda, which emerged during political and economic crises of the 1970, supplements the country’s rural-produced food supply. Today, UPA is practiced by a broad range of residents and provides them with nutrient-dense foods—including vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy—that cannot easily be transported long distances. Nonetheless, most UPA in Kampala serves informal markets, and until quite recently, UPA lacked support from city authorities. Before 1990, city and state authorities denoted UPA as insignificant to the economy and a threat to public health. More recently, however, official recognition and support for UPA in Kampala has grown. In 2006, four Kampala City Council ordinances provided for the licensing, control, and regulation of all crops, livestock, and dairy products produced and sold within the city. The National Agricultural Advisory Service (NAADS) program has since enacted an implementation framework for UPA in Kampala, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF) developed a National Urban Agriculture Policy that provides urban farmers with better information services and a Development Strategy and Investment Plan (DSIP) that also acknowledges UPA.

 

Research Intent

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My case study in Kampala served as a baseline for my summer research. Unlike local food production in many affluent cities, urban farming in Uganda directly contributes to the city’s food security: it provides a direct income and a food source to urban residents. LFS throughout Europe, Asia, and Australia are often engulfed in a niche cultural rhetoric and constricted by time and financial barriers that may exclude lower socioeconomic classes. Therefore, learning about the potential for LFS to directly increase urban household’s food security—and the corresponding challenges—provided a valuable perspective before traveling to my other study cities.

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Through my pre-trip literature review, I learned that urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) forms a key part of the city’s food system and supply. However, during my first few days conducting research in Kampala, many of my research contacts—politicians, scientists, and Kampala residents—questioned the importance of UPA to the city’s food supply and food security. Soil scientists at the National Agricultural Research Organisation, directors of the Kampala Capital City Authority’s (KCCA) urban agriculture program, and everyday people I met emphasized how urban residents’ food security is dependent upon rural agricultural production, which sources over ninety percent of Kampala’s food supply. Nonetheless, I sought to understand the present extent to which and future potential for UPA to contribute to the city’s food security.

 

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KCCA Urban Agriculture Project

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Program Overview

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The KCCA’s Urban Agriculture Enterprise Program (UAEP) is Kampala’s first and only government-supported urban agriculture program, which champions urban farming to increase residents’ food security. The UAEP falls under the KCCA’s Community Involvement and Gender Program, and each of the three Program divisions—for three out of five of Kampala’s divisions—is managed by the respective division’s Director of Agribusiness and National Agricultural Advisory Service (NAADS) Coordinator. The UEAP was created in 2012 to support a Parliamentarian mandate: to increase Kampala residents’ food availability, nutrition, and income security.

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Abdu has managed the Kampala Central Division’s UAEP, the first branch of the program, since its inception. Like all KCCA programs, Kampala’s UAEP emerged through community interventions, during which Abdu and his colleagues met with political, religious, and other community leaders on a neighborhood basis. They learned about food insecurity and employment challenges facing local residents and developed their urban agriculture program based on communities’ needs. The UAEP targets populations vulnerable to food insecurity: single women, unemployed youth, elderly people, and people with HIV/AIDS.

 

The KCCA provides select program beneficiaries with comprehensive support for them to develop their own urban agricultural enterprise: vegetable farming, mushroom growing, poultry farming, dairy farming, or creating value-added food products. The beneficiaries receive financial and technical support throughout the development of their enterprises. They then may consume and/or sell their products, which increases their direct access to food and/or provides them with an income source.

The UAEP has grown significantly over the past five years. Kampala’s Central Division alone has sponsored 500 beneficiaries, and Abdu has personally observed many instances in which the program has significantly enhanced people’s livelihoods. James Epilo, KCCA Director of Agribusiness for Kampala’s Makindye Divison, also emphasized the program’s success in providing nutrition security to program beneficiaries, through their increased access to vegetables. Additionally, the UAEP benefits significantly more people than its select beneficiaries. The program also assists community members through KCCA-led public trainings and its instigation of community agribusiness support networks—neighbors help neighbors by providing preliminary agricultural equipment and knowledge.

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Two Beneficiaries’ Stories

 

My visits to two beneficiaries—Maria, the mushroom grower, and Dembe, the urban gardener—confirmed the UAEP’s significant impact on specific beneficiaries’ lives.

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Maria lives in heavily populated informal settlement near Kampala’s center. She heard about the UEAP through her Local Council, which spread the word throughout her neighborhood. She soon visited the Central Division headquarters for training, toured Kyanja (a city-run urban agricultural research site and educational center), toured other beneficiaries’ farms, and was provided with seeds, a drum, and a water pump to grow mushrooms in a small structure in her yard.

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Maria's mushroom growing enterprise has been extremely successful. She sells her mushrooms to neighbors and traders (who then sell them to restaurants). In her neighborhood, she is well-known; during my visit, she received two phone calls from traders asking here if new mushrooms were ready. Before she started growing mushrooms, Maria did not have a job, and now she has a steady income to support herself and her two children. Furthermore, Maria volunteers her time and knowledge to help her neighbors start growing their own mushrooms; however, since they are not directly sponsored by the UEAP, many of them struggle with the startup costs.

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Dembe is the first UAEP beneficiary in Kampala’s army barracks; she heard of the KCCA UEAP program before her neighbors because she is the Local Council leader. Dembe was chosen as a beneficiary because she had a small garden before the program began, which demonstrated her commitment to urban gardening. When she was chosen as a beneficiary this past March, the KCCA gave her soil, seedlings, sacks, manure, and pesticides. She attended a two-day training, and now they return to check on her garden every few months. Dembe both eats and sells her vegetables. Public transportation from the army barracks to markets is costly; therefore, Dembe's garden is important to provide herself and her neighbors with affordable, easily accessible vegetables. Dembe often overhears her neighbors walking by, saying, “I wish, I wish…”. In fact, after admiring Dembe's garden, many of them are now busy creating their own small gardens—to demonstrate their interest before the next round of UEAP beneficiaries is chosen. Dembe also hoped the KCCA would bring her some more supplies when they returned in August—she could not afford new seedlings or to travel to Kyanja on her own.

 

*The two beneficiaries’ names and other identifying details have been altered to respect their privacy.

 

Program Challenges

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Despite the UAEP’s successes—particularly for individual beneficiaries—the Program’s expansion is impeded by the city’s physical, food system, and political infrastructure. To begin, the UAEP’s limited funding constrains its impact: only select beneficiaries—which amount to less than 0.001% of Kampala’s population—have received the funding and training necessary to start their own urban agriculture enterprises.

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Furthermore, the program has a very low retention rate: out of the approximate one hundred beneficiaries of the Makindye Division’s UAEP, only about twenty percent have stuck with the program. One significant contributor to the program’s low retention rate is Kampala’s rapid land development. Most of the UAEP’s beneficiaries do not own the land they develop their agricultural enterprises on. Thus, program participants’ small agricultural spaces—most often in their backyards or the space between their homes and the road—are often threatened by land owners’ future development. Abdu described numerous cases in which his team checked in on their beneficiaries, and the thriving chicken coops or vegetable plots they had observed just one week before were gone. Often, the beneficiaries were too.

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KCCA-sponsored farmers also do not produce enough food to be sold at licensed city markets. Indeed, many urban farmers overcome this barrier by selling their products through informal means, such as outside the gates of city markets, through small stands on the sides of roads, or at informal markets. The KCCA recognizes this challenge and hopes to mitigate unlicensed food sales by supporting the development of agricultural cooperatives. Agricultural cooperatives could connect urban farmers who produce similar foods, thereby providing each other with increased day-to-day support as well as the means to sell their products at the major markets within town: while one farmer may not have enough chickens to sell at a large market, all the poultry farmers in a neighborhood certainly would. To-date, however, no cooperatives have been established.

           

One final challenge for the UEAP is the lack of coordination between city-level and national governance in Uganda. Epilo stressed the disconnect between national goals and enacting them on a city-level. The UEAP emerged from a Parliamentarian mandate, yet there have not been any joint Parliament-city UPA initiatives. My interview with a Commissioner of Disaster Preparedness at the Prime Minister’s Office confirmed this disconnect. While food security is a key component of disaster preparedness, his office predominantly works to ensure rural populations’ food security. He had not heard of the KCCA’s UEAP but stressed that his office must put more resources towards understanding and increasing Kampala residents’ food security—potentially, through urban agriculture.

 

Kyanja Agricultural Research Center

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The KCCA’s UEAP is closely related to the Kyanja Agriculture Research Center, a research-learning farm located ten kilometers from Kampala’s city center. Kyanja, founded in 2013, runs five main projects: poultry, piggery, catfish aquaponics, mushroom growing, and vegetable growing. Kyanja functions largely as a business, and it sells each of its agricultural products to urban farmers throughout the city. However, its mission is rooted in enhancing urban farmers’ livelihoods.

Kyanja’s primary objective is to train urban farmers how to grow crops in small spaces, to increase urban farmers’ productivity and secure their income. Each Wednesday and Sunday, the center is open to the public for trainings on a variety of urban agricultural techniques that are practiced on-site. Furthermore, Kyanja’s work extends throughout the city. Kato Godfrey, Head of Crop Science at Kyanja, described how the resource center provides a variety of extension services to all types of urban farmers (of all incomes) in many locations. Its team provides personal consultation and monitoring of people’s individual urban farming operations and donates supplies to individuals that have demonstrated sufficient resources and commitment to their home gardens.

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Godfrey identifies the greatest barrier for UPA in Kampala as lack of space. He often meets people who want to begin urban agriculture projects but do not have the few square meters they need to make it worth their while. Nonetheless, he is confident that the KCCA is well-suited to respond to Kampala residents’ needs and provide them with the other forms of training (e.g. how to bake or make crafts) to continue increasing the city’s food security.

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I visited Kyanja for the second time during its open tour hours, and I was privileged to meet two government officials who were also touring the Center. Throughout the tour, Peter Kaijju, KCCA’s Head of Public and Corporate affairs, and his colleagues verbalized their great appreciation for Kyanja’s “illustrious goals” and good work. They also discussed potential additions to the Center, such as a waiting area and a café, which would enhance visitors’ experience. Furthermore, they discussed one development that would be momentous in the KCCA’s continued support of small-scale urban agriculture: the development of cold rooms in each city district. District-wide slaughterhouses and distribution centers would combat farmers’ current barriers to finding proper distribution channels for their agricultural products. Furthermore, Godfrey hopes to supplement these future cold rooms with a market system located at Kyanja. He hopes farmers will soon be able to sell all types of agricultural products (not just poultry) directly to the Center, where they would be sold to other buyers. These guaranteed, formalized food networks would increase farmers’ food security and livelihoods by providing them with reliable market channels.

 

NARO Mukono

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My visit to NARO Mukono, a town 25 kilometers outside of Kampala, served as a secondary case study in Uganda. Like the KCCA’s UAEP, the goal of NARO Mukono’s urban agriculture program is to teach UPA farmers how to maximize the productivity of small plots of agricultural land to provide the farmers with future food, income, and employment. They do so through community-based trainings as well as supplying more comprehensive support—that is, materials and continued advisory services—to select urban farmers. NARO focuses primarily on backyard gardening techniques, such as buckets, sacks, food towers, and hanging gardens. Monica Muyinda, the program’s agricultural technician, explained why the program focuses on vegetable production: vegetables grow quickly—even in small spaces—, vegetable farming requires only low-cost inputs, and vegetables are healthy.

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Since the project’s inception, the NARO Mukono team—with support from community organizations and local politicians—has trained 5,000 farmers and provided 20,000 farmers with free materials. To combat challenges posed by lack of available formal markets for urban farmers—the same challenges urban farmers in Kampala face—the NARO Mukono center urban farming team assists farmers in finding potential markets for their products. Muyinda described how she spends a good deal of each day on the phone assisting farmers with sales. Despite the time-consuming nature of this part of her job, she has successfully helped urban farmers connect with formal food markets and cultivated relationships between urban farmers and other buyers, like universities and restaurants. Muyinda dreams that NARO Mukono will one day train 500,000 urban farmers. She also believes all of Kampala’s vegetables could one day be sourced locally, which would both increase urban residents’ income and health.

 

Summary & Key Takeaways

 

The KCCA’s UAEP demonstrates UPA’s significant contribution to Kampala’s food security, specifically for vulnerable demographics. By meeting with UAEP beneficiaries, I learned how receiving minimal training and startup supplies enables residents to start their own agribusiness, which provides them with a new food and income source. Through interviews with KCCA policymakers and program leaders, I also learned about the Program’s key challenges, which are caused by the KCCA’s limited resources and lack of coordination with other government bodies, as well as the city’s space constraints, lack of secure land tenure laws, and lack of accessible, formal market avenues.

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Even if the majority of Kampala’s food supply continues to be sourced from rural areas, UPA can bolster urban residents’ everyday nutrition security, and residents’ food security amidst environmental and economic disturbances. Urban poultry and vegetable production add an important, reliable supply of often-lacking nutrients to urban residents’ diets. Furthermore, in case of decreased agricultural productivity or increased prices of food produced in agricultural areas, UPA would provide a reliable supply of food to urban residents. Still, ensuring the long-term sustainability of Kampala’s UPA requires greater support from urban and agricultural planning at the national and city level.