Project Details

Main Objective

To modernize the agricultural market and empowering potential rural farmers by developing their skills throughout the lifecycle with a view to increase their participation and better match supply and demand of their products.

Description

Many rural farmers in Uganda are held back by barriers that prevent them from prospering and reinvesting. A real support would protect them and their rights to boost their productivity and unleash their potential to fight hunger, climate change and poverty. Its believed that empowering rural farmers can contribute to improving their position and opportunities in the country and give them increased influence in the communities and the economy of the country. Viewing empowerment as a multidimensional process constituting the "power to" realize one&
goal, the opportunity to exercise "power with" others, and the ability to find and nurture "power within" the self. Our findings indicate that value added agriculture provides a unique context for Uganda as an economy. At the same time the extent to which value added agriculture constitute a venue for farmers.

Agriculture in Uganda represents a big substantial share to the country&
Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Farming is the principle economic activity, about 95% of the rural population in Uganda relies on agriculture and without farming there would be little to keep many communities alive mostly the rural areas. Many rural farmers in Uganda are less educated and do not have entrepreneurship competences. Rural farmers and their contribution to the economy is mostly unseen and invisible. They are not seen since they are generally expected to work in rural remote areas. Helping them to get started should be a policy must if Uganda is to meet the many challenges (poverty, high Unemployment rate, famine in some parts of the country, etc) that it faces.

Rural farmers generally do not have vocational education, they are less educated and they learn farming by informal learning while working in their farms or other farms. They also do not have access to many of the agricultural resources including credits, inputs and productive assets as their urban counterparts do, they face enormous agricultural challenges say pests, drought, poor agricultural yield and livestock epidemics and little do they know on how to over them. These restrict their own progress in professional skills and societal status. Moreover rural farmers in agriculture are not equal in terms of economic return, they are less literate than urban farmers and they are paid less in their agricultural products. Because of that they need training in this field in order not to survive but to thrive in this sector.