Why several interventions targeted at farming communities don’t survive

Since Agriculture is the backbone of Uganda’s economy through its great contribution to the GDP, several organizations, development agencies as well as companies have come up with initiatives and interventions to improve farm productivity which would increase yields and hence the overall contribution to the county’s economy.

With the help of funding from donors, numerous projects have been targeted to rural farming communities with an aim of improving their livelihoods, but these have not been sustainable since as soon as the projects end, farmers resort to their old ways of farming.

The biggest cause of the above problem is the approach that is leveraged by most of the projects whereby handouts in form of money, free inputs among others are provided to farmers as incentives for them to transition to whatever the projects are promoting.

In some cases, demo plots have been set up in the communities with an aim of showing farmers what they could get if they took up whatever the projects are proposing but still farmers don’t replicate these practices back home since they usually don’t embrace them as theirs.

The root cause of the above-mentioned approach is the tendency by several development agencies to think that they know best what the farmers need more than the farmers themselves.

This results in spending a lot of time in offices that are usually found in urban areas developing proposals with unrealistic solutions for communities whose needs are not even known by these agencies. By the time the funding is acquired from the donors, there is pressure to produce results which leads to the imposing of the “solutions” to communities which don’t need them.

It is always important to conduct needs assessments before ideating or coming up with any sort of solutions that are usually backed up with great numbers of proposals. The proposals may be approved, solutions forced on to communities through projects, but these will die with the projects since they were never what the communities needed.

By taking time to identify the gaps or needs of communities through needs assessments, organizations and development agencies will then be able to identify the best solutions for the farmers’ problems such that by the time the projects are being brought to the communities, the farmers already consider them as their own due to the fact that they were engaged in the initial stages.

With this consultative approach, initiatives and solutions will live beyond the projects which will then contribute to the improvement of farm productivity, yields and hence the community livelihoods.

Mr Thomas Malunda is an agroecologist, Ag tech startup and Agri business expert. [email protected]