My Side of the Mountain: Sustainable Agriculture in Uganda

This week has started out much more slowly than the last three. While the days are going by fast, they are not quite as jam-packed as last week was, which is a nice way to end my time here in Uganda. However, it also means that my blog posts are likely to get less exciting. In any case, we started off the week with a day focused on sustainable agriculture in the developing world. We had a seminar in the morning, and in the afternoon we visited KIHEFO’s rabbit breeding project and a nearby mushroom project. Agriculture is something I didn’t know much about before I came here, and something that is definitely a huge part of Ugandan life. Many Ugandans are subsistance farmers, which has caused a lot of challenges as a cash economy has become more and more prevalent throughout the country. One thing I learned a lot about yesterday, and throughout this month, is the role of gender in agriculture. Here in Uganda, women do the majority of the agricultural work, but have little control over what crops they can plant and what they can do with the crops they harvest. All of the responsibilities of the farm are broken down by gender. One example of this is that all perennial crops are controlled by men. Women cannot choose to buy and plant those crops; they must wait for their husbands to make that decision.

In addition to the traditional fruit and vegetable farms, throughout this month we have learned about different ways to help find local, sustainable solutions to malnutrition in southwestern Uganda. Yesterday we got to visit KIHEFO’s rabbit breeding project, which is still starting up but has a lot of potential. Earlier this month, I helped revise and administer nutrition surveys in Rubira, a nearby village. Future volunteers will continue to administer these surveys in Rubira and in other villages to identify families with malnourished children. The goal of this is to be able to provide qualifying families with one male rabbit and two female rabbits to start their own breeding project so the family will be able to have protein to eat and have a more balanced diet. Eventually, the family could sell some of their rabbits back to KIHEFO, and KIHEFO could sell rabbit meat in town, which would help cover costs of the program. We got to see a program similar to this in the mushroom project that we visited yesterday. This project gives mushroom spawn to farmers, and the farmers grow the mushrooms. After the farmers grow the mushrooms, they can sell them back to the mushroom training center, where they can be packaged and sold. The profit from the sales of the mushrooms goes back towards funding the project. These two projects are local, innovative solutions to the malnutrition problem in Uganda that involve sustainable agriculture. Below are some pictures.