Food production is Uganda’s biggest opportunity for employment
Life immediately after University can get daunting for fresh graduates. Fifteen years ago, when I exited Makerere University with my Bachelors Degree qualification, I was under the illusion that I could survive on a monthly net salary of about Shs300,000 (about US$ 160 at the time).
In fact, I would have gladly accepted a job paying me that much and hoped to live happily, at least for a few years.
Four years in Makerere’s Lumumba Hall had conditioned me not to consider that eating a meal took more than a bell going off from the dining hall and that when you washed your clothes the water meter was counting and that it counted in legal tender units.
The brighter one’s house shone with adequate lighting at night would finally show through one’s wallet and I got to appreciate the full impact of such otherwise simple facts, not long after I left the University Freedom Square, a prouder holder of a first degree in Engineering.
If one had to offer support to a couple of other people beyond oneself, things got even more complicated.
Providence landed me a job that paid slightly more than twice the three hundred thousand I had fantasized about, and the difficulties of my life soon after I commenced work constitute a sad tale for another day.
Well, that was fifteen years ago and things have since changed. There are more graduates leaving universities every year and the situation of searching for jobs gets tougher as more Ugandans acquire university degrees and other qualifications.
Watching the recent graduation ceremonies especially at Makerere University made me think about what could answer the yearning for jobs for many of those fresh graduates.
If I had a chance to tell them, my advice would be coined in one word – food. Producing and trading in food is destined to be one of the most lucrative businesses in the near future. Let me illustrate this with a couple of things I have written about before.
FAO reports that Uganda's fertile agricultural land has the potential to feed 200 million people. This about half the population Uganda herself, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Mozambique, Eritrea, Madagascar, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Burundi, Mauritius, Djibouti, Comoros, Mayotte, Reunion and Seychelles.
Only 35 percent of the country’s arable land is being cultivated while eighty percent of all the land is arable. There is a general lack of irrigation and fertilizer use is not developed and as a result, production is greatly vulnerable to rainfall and pests.
Uganda has one of the highest irrigation potential in the world with over fifteen percent of her surface area covered by fresh water resources. The utilization rate of the entire renewable surface water resources of the country was only 0.01 percent as of 2013.
On annual basis, Africa spends about US$ 35 billion on food imports, an amount equivalent to Uganda’s entire GDP. Researchers have indicated that although global food demand is expected to increase 60 percent by 2050 from the 2007 position, the rise will be much greater in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the region at greatest food security risk because by 2050 its population will increase two and a half times and demand for cereals will approximately triple. Current levels of cereal consumption already depend on substantial imports.
That food production is set to be exceedingly lucrative therefore needs no great emphasis. I consider that significant focus on employment creation, both at personal and national strategy levels, should therefore be tuned towards the food industry.
One of the challenges around the above is that traditionally, education in the African setup is perceived as an escape from farming. Education is perceived as a gateway to white-collar privilege.
A colleague once told me about a friend of his, who, after finishing university in Kampala, found a room to rent and his parents who are cattle farmers began periodically selling off an animal every so often to send money to their son to stay in the city and survive as he looked for an office job.
One day, this young man got counsel and stopped his parents from selling any more cows and instead went to his village to run the very farm from which the cows were being sold. He is currently a financially liberated young man.
A couple of other people have resigned white-collar jobs to venture into passion fruit farming, for example.
One of them, well known to me, told me recently that his only regret is that he took so long to do it.
Mr Mugisha is a chartered risk analyst and risk management consultant
