LEADERSHIP AND CLIMBING OUT OF POVERTY

President Yoweri Museveni is reported to have been shocked at the poverty in the Mayuge region last weekend on his way to commemorate Bishop Hannington Memorial Day.

Museveni is reported to have refused to return to the area unless things improved markedly. He took particular issue with their lack of a tarmac road.

Which begs the question, how do communities climb out of poverty?

"Thankfully most of us are a generation or two away from our peasant ancestry, so examples abound of how to climb out of poverty....

I know one particular gentleman who was a toddler when his father returned from the second world war. His father was offered a bursary for one son to study.  This man whose brothers were much older, some married already, benefitted from the bursary instead of his siblings.

Years later there was marked difference between the family of the last-born son who went to school and that of his siblings.

So, lesson number one, education is a prerequisite for climbing out of poverty.

Part of the reason is that this man, call him Jack, was able to move away from the village, whose main activity was subsistence farming, to the big city where there was a lot of high value economic activity and plenty of opportunity for a person with an education.

Economic activity is concentrated in urban areas because the infrastructure -- energy, transport and communication, are concentrated there and make it easy for business to set up. But also just as important, if not more important, is the concentration of quality human resource.

Lesson number two, is that you have a better chance of climbing out of poverty in the urban areas than in the rural, that is dependent of course if you are educated or skilled to take advantage of urban opportunities.

Urban areas are also critical as markets for rural production. The concentration of populations means it more convenient to supply them than populations spread across huge areas. However, to satisfy those markets, production has to be scaled up beyond subsistence. The farmer who makes the most money from supplying urban areas is that one who can scale up his production or/and organize other producers to supply that market. Also the farmer who can do this and is closer to the urban area can earn more of the final shelf price.

The recent “Uganda National Household Survey, 2019/20” offers some clues as to why Mayuge and the general Busoga area may be lagging behind, despite its proximity to major urban areas and good agricultural lands.

The Busoga region is second only to the Buganda region in population size.  That may not be a problem, but for the region’s dependency ratio, which is only behind Karamoja areas at 108 per 100 working people. The dependency ratio describes how many people depend on the working people of the area and is often an indication of the average age of the population. The younger the population the higher the dependency.

Kampala, which has the lowest figure has 53 dependents per 100 workers. Its commonsense, more dependency less economic activity.

Interestingly, the Busoga area has a higher primary school enrollment 83.7 percent than the national average of 80 percent. The same for secondary school enrollment, which is 28 percent, higher than the national average of 27. Percent. While adult literacy falls off to 61.4 percent compared to the national average of 72.4 percent, the people of the region can not be accused of being illiterate.

As a further indicator of human productivity, the people of the area are not necessarily more prone to illness than the national average and 83.8 percent are within three kilometers of a health facility higher than the national average of 76.7 percent.

A look down the numbers also shows that the proportion of houses with iron sheet roofs, cement floors and built of bricks are all higher than the national average.

Given these figures its safe to say that the people of the region are just as likely as any region in the country to have lower poverty numbers.

However, 55.2 percent of the families are involved in the subsistence economy as compared to the national average of 39.2 percent. In Kampala this figure is 3.3 percent...

But maybe they can not be blamed, because to grow beyond subsistence agriculture one has to have access to the market to which you can sell the surplus. In terms of paved road network, the Busoga area is painfully down the pecking order with 254 km. The Buganda region has 1,594 km.

Access to the electricity grid is 13.3 percent compared to the national average of 18.9 percent.

It seems to me that the people of the Busoga region, while their dependency rates are off the charts are just as educated or literate, healthy as the rest of the nation. What seems to be lacking is the access to opportunity as reflected in their relatively poor road coverage and access to electricity.

These are public goods which are often a function of the leadership in the area’s ability to lobby than anything else, given that the area has voted consistently for the ruling NRM.

And this is important because a major ingredient of lifting communities out of poverty is leadership at every level. The leadership to mobilise people, aggregate and deploy resources. The extent to which an area is poor, especially when the area lies in the lap of abundance is a reflection on that area’s leadership....

Leadership is required to identify the most pressing issues of the day and provide direction on how to resolve them.

The story is told that after the end of the Korean war in 1953 the leadership decided that the most sustainable way to develop the country would be to export. But they had nothing to export. Or so they thought. The leadership identified a market in wigs and mobilized the people to cut off their hair for export. Today South Korea is a leader in high technology exports.

Left to their own devices the people can not move but with good leadership anything is possible.