I’m Elizabeth Kharono. I’m the founder and director of an organization called CLEAR–Uganda. CLEAR stands for the
. In Uganda we work in the eastern part of the country, in an area called Mbale District.
In Mbale, like the rest of Uganda, about 80 percent of the population is dependent on subsistence farming, so it is an area where smallholder farmers really predominate food production and most of the food that comes to the town and the rural areas is done by small holder farmers, the majority of whom are also women, women smallholder farmers.
Tell us a little about CLEAR–Uganda and how you work with those farmers.
CLEAR–Uganda is part of a larger network, the Centre for Land, Economy and Rights of Women, which is a regional organization. The way CLEAR works is that in each country where we establish a base, we define our programs on the basis of the local needs. So CLEAR–Uganda started its work in 2007 to work with smallholder farmers in one district, which is Mbale District. The main objective is to see that there is increased food security in line with the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to reduce severe hunger, by 2015.
We started with conversations at the very local level to see if there were any efforts to reduce hunger, deliberate efforts to reduce hunger, and to know what is the status of food security in this area and who are the real producers of food in this area. From those early conversations it became clear that not many smallholder farmers, especially women, were even aware that there were these commitments to reduce hunger. What they knew was that there was a lot of hunger, but what they didn’t know was that there were all these global commitments to reduce hunger.
Those conversations resulted in efforts by the communities themselves to try to address their food security needs. So starting from just increasing their labor to try to get more food grown, an activity which resulted in us as CLEAR–Uganda linking these small farmers to research and also to their leaders, we found in 2009 that there was a big problem of acquiring seed because there had been these high food prices in 2008. So some of the things we did were to link farmers through their Members of Parliament to get seeds but also link them with research so that we get improved seed, especially grains, which are considered by people in this area to be hunger crops.
From all those initial discussions what has emerged is a deliberate effort by the communities themselves to increase their food security in partnership with CLEAR–Uganda. We have even facilitated community-based food security days, which aim at farmers, first of all, bringing forward their problems, what stops them from acquiring food security, and then getting researchers to come to explain why all these challenges continue and the opportunities there are, to get support from the researchers, and also more importantly to get policy makers from the local governments and district officials to come and listen to the farmers and understand these challenges and where we’ve reached now there are commitments from all these levels of governance to increase the attention to food security concerns, at least in this area we are working in.
Could you achieve a bigger impact by increasing the productivity of commercial farms? What’s the strategic advantage of working with smallholder farmers?
They’re really the producers. They are really the ones who farm and feed the community. With all the constraints they have, still they are the main producers of food for the urban and rural populations. So if there is increased productivity, these are the real workers. These are the ones who are really tilling their land, and it’s out of their efforts, with all the difficulties, these are the ones who are feeding not only their communities but the whole of Uganda. Actually 80 percent of Uganda’s population is rural and dependent on subsistence produce, even in the urban centers.
Because they are the main agents, and because what they need is very basic support to remove these constraints, it is the quickest way — it is really the quickest way to make sure that there is increased food security and also increased productivity. But also it has now been recognized that the best way to address poverty is through investing in these smallholder farmers. It is very evident that if the smallholder farmers are
