Refugees find hope in cassava farming

Cassava is helping refugee communities fight hunger.  Photo / FILe

What you need to know:

  • These activities have been boosted by access to financial services provided by a number of partners including Vision Fund, Equity Bank and Rural Financial Initiatives, funded by Financial Services Deepening Uganda/Africa.

Awalk through Palorinya refugee Settlement in Obongi District brings you face to face with a number of sprawling farming activities and small scale businesses carried out by the refugees.

From second hand clothes, to foodstuff, and other manufactured products, the refugees are slowly moving away from depending on food hand-outs by aid agencies to self-sustainability based on the incomes they get from their own sweat. These activities have been boosted by access to financial services provided by a number of partners including Vision Fund, Equity Bank and Rural Financial Initiatives, funded by Financial Services Deepening Uganda/Africa.

Under the programme, 8,703 saving group members have received productive credit to date, 74 percent who are women and 308 savings groups have received loans through this intervention.

For Jackson Duku Mark, a South Sudanese refugee at Palorinya Refugee Settlement, this is a step in the right direction. Duku who is also a pastor says when he left South Sudan in 2016, he did not know where to start from.

“We all fled and found ourselves in different places in Uganda. However, we were finally brought to this settlement, but the start was not easy because we were depending on food from UNHCR,” he says.

“We were dealing in these small things until when Vision Fund came here and found us organised and started extending to us loans as groups and we would borrow from our groups to expand our businesses,” Duku says.

Cassava farming

Duku says they first started a savings group in 2017 where they would save the little money they have and eventually when the funds accumulated, they started lending the money to the group members.  He says the group was later helped by the Vision Fund that trained them in financial literacy, and record keeping. The organisation later gave the group money in form of loans at a very low interest rate which helped them to increase their capital base.

“The Vision Fund has given us three cycles of loans and each time we have always paid back. This helped me to increase my fish stock,” Duku says. “Using this money, I rented a garden from a community member where I grow cassava. This year I have harvested 31 bags and I still have more and I am expecting about Shs5m from this harvest,” he adds.