Feeding children: Position schools as model centres of agriculture

The Minister of Education and Sports, Janet Museveni has recently been going around the country, decrying parents’ inability to feed their children. Her concern is not unfounded. Part of our 70 per cent dropout rate at primary level is down to food. Hungry children cannot study.
In 2013, at the height of the corruption and maladministration of Naads, President Museveni, as he is wont to do, launched Operation Wealth Creation (OWC), - instead of fixing what is broken – to increase household incomes and fight poverty through farming.

But evidence is that OWC is not the magical bullet it was hoped to be. Its coordinator, Gen Salim Saleh, admits that using soldiers as implementers might have been a bad idea after all. Worse, in a 2017 Ubos report, it was reported that an alarming eight million Ugandans have slid into, and now live in poverty. That means they live on one meal or none a day. Clearly, household incomes have not increased.

For a while now, government officials have taken to victim-blaming, in their puzzling argument for plastic containers and entanda. First of all, we must be the only country hoping to find solutions for today’s challenges by looking back to the 70s and 80s. But also, that line of thinking is null and disingenuous, in a country where eight million people (including in places as close to the city as Luweero) have one meal or none a day. Parents are simply too poor to pack anything for their children.

To fix education, we must fix agriculture. So the news that soldiers are failing at wealth creation might actually be a blessing in disguise – because it presents an opportunity for us to build our education system around agriculture.
That is why Mama (pun because we are talking food) must be interested in the goings on at OWC because it just might fix some of her ministerial headaches.

Agriculture is a main source of livelihood and employment for more than 60 per cent of Uganda’s population – which means that it has real implications on parents’ ability to meet increasingly extortionate education demands. But also, and even more directly linked learning to outcomes, it is impossible for anyone, let alone children, to study on an empty stomach.

Schools can be positioned as model centres of excellence in agriculture through policy reform to have ‘Agronomics’ as part of the teaching scope for primary schools – at the earliest possible opportunity. In rural areas where schools are surrounded by vast tracts of land, have them hosting model farms and testing agricultural innovations.

Partnerships between schools and churches and landlords should bring the same outcomes.
In urban centres, where schools are inexplicably licensed to operate in corridors, let us turn the walls into the bedrock of urban farming and micro-gardening techniques that are the new fad. All this can be done without affecting learners’ study hours, as Dr Brenda Naluyima and Cleophash Alinaitwe of the Art Planet Academy in Masindi have shown in school contexts, in some areas, working with casual labourers and prisoners – depending on the circumstances. There’s a benefit for the teachers as well, much maligned by the economics of things.

One could argue that whereas soldiers are to be feared, teachers are (supposed to be) respected. Yet education continues to be afflicted by high turnover, absenteeism and salary dissatisfaction. As creators of wealth, their prestige would significantly rise, as would their incomes. Again, without affecting study hours or outcomes. Of course, I am aware that my argument is only looking at the end product – food – and that the agriculture value chain is chain complex. I also know that reform – the kind that eradicates poverty as is envisaged by OWC – is not a black and white affair without serious implications and complexities. You just have to look at our limping school system to find evidence of this.

But imagine this, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, agriculture contributes over 70 per cent of Uganda’s export earnings and provides the bulk of the raw materials for most of the industries that are predominantly agro-based. We also already know that more than 60 per cent of Ugandans earn from the sector. We have more than 20 thousand primary schools and about eight million children in primary school cycle.
Imagine how much we would produce locally to end hunger (at home and in schools) and poverty. Imagine the innovations – in the agriculture value chain – in just 10 years, if schools were at the centre of our agriculture. Imagine the wealth.

Mr Rukwengye is the founder and chief executive - Boundless Minds.
Twitter: @Rukwengye