The livelihoods of 5,000 coffee farmers in the Mount Elgon region are set to improve following a partnership between GIZ Employment and Skills for Development in Africa (E4D) programme together with International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) Uganda and Olam Food Ingredients (OFI).
(E4D) is a programme is commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and is co-funded in Uganda by the European Union (EU) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad).
E4D aims at improving employment opportunities in Africa in cooperation with the private sector promoting enterprise development, skills development and serving as a linkage between the demand side and the supply side of labor.
Instead of blanket support provided through traditional service delivery models, the partnership will co-design a suite of scientifically tested living income strategies, tailored to the diverse needs of coffee farmers in Uganda.
The project, which started in February 2021 and will continue for two and half years, aims to improve farmers’ livelihood by enabling them to optimize their investment in coffee, earn more from other on farm activities, and thus reduce the living income gap by 20 per cent.
According to Sarah Margiotta, the IITA Uganda Climate-Smart Agriculture Team Lead, “IITA researchers will build on existing experience and data from Olam, IITA and GIZ, the LI Community of Practice (LI COP), and other publicly available information to determine specific farmer typologies within a sample set of 2,000 farming households in the OFI farmer network.”
She adds, “Research shows that there are many variances between farmers. Therefore, a farmer segmentation exercise will be conducted to enable the identification of different clusters of farmers with similar characteristics. By better understanding specific farmer characteristics, the private sector can more effectively target extension service delivery models.”
The project implementers will identify, test, assess, measure and apply the most efficient living income strategies for different farmer segments to reduce the living income gap and enable them to afford a decent standard of living for all members of their households.
Donald Agaba, Team Leader E4D says as the backbone of Uganda’s economy, the agriculture sector is critical to the country’s economic development and this growth will be realised when smallholders increase their yields and incomes.
“By implementing this project, E4D is contributing to the Ugandan Government’s target to increase coffee production from 4.6 million bags a year to 20 million bags a year by 2025,” Agaba says.
Yves-Pascal Suter, Senior Strategist, Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, at OFI adds, “To achieve this, the project will use an approach that considers the very diverse realities of farming households to provide tailored and specific advice and services.”
“Furthermore, our work on the ground with coffee farmers, means we all understand the importance of looking at the farm as a whole; at the pathways that have the most effective capacity to improve the livelihoods of these families; how to exploit the potential synergies between crops, and livestock; and beyond that, the different resources and social structures that exist. With OFI as a partner, the project will be looking at all this through an economic lens, in terms of return–on–investment for the farmers. Crucially, this innovative project is also scalable and should help guide and inform further actions in the region, as well as globally”.
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