Coffee farmers to be registered for proper planning

What you need to know:

UCDA is scheduled to celebrate 25 years of existence on March 24, this year.
The October and November statistics show that the country exported a total of 617,171 60kg bags of coffee beans, up from 472,119 bags exported the same period the previous year.

Kampala. The Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) is set to embark on registering coffee farmers across the country in a bid to document the activity for proper planning.
Currently, there is no conclusive documented data that show the number of coffee farmers in Uganda and the prominent coffee types in Uganda. Mr Emanuel Lyamulemye, the UCDA managing director, said this exercise will start as a pilot project at the end of this month in Mukono District and later be rolled out to the entire country.

He revealed that in executing this exercise, they intend to use elite graduates in the community, who will use a newly developed application on smart phones to register farmers.
The exercise will capture a farmer’s bio data, location, farming practice, acreage, the number of trees, types of coffee being grown, the age of the coffee trees and other basic details.

“We are going to facilitate any graduate with a smart phone that can do our job diligently. We are only going to cover transport and a small allowance,” Mr Lyamulemu said.
More than 1,500 youth are expected to take part in the enumeration exercise. He added that the exercise will cover all 96 coffee growing districts in Uganda.
Available data from UCDA shows that Uganda’s coffee exports have increased both in volume and value in the first two months of the calendar year.
The October and November statistics show that the country exported a total of 617,171 60kg bags of coffee beans, up from 472,119 bags exported the same period the previous year.
UCDA is scheduled to celebrate 25 years of existence on March 24, this year.