Thursday, November 10, 2022

FACING THE CHALLENGE OF POVERTY ERADICATION: AN EU AND UGANDA STORY

What is poverty? What does it look like? What would it take to pull out of it, for the individual or eradicate it for whole communities?

At a very basic level the poor man cannot sustain himself. He cannot take care of the basics – food, shelter, clothing to a satisfactory degree. From a purely material standpoint the poor person has little or no income to speak of.

Going by that, getting an income has to be the first thing to look into.

A poor society is characterized by much the same, the only difference being it is scaled up to cover many individuals, many families, many communities. For communities you would still have to raise individual incomes but in addition ease access to market.

The 11th European Development Fund (EDF), which run from 2014 to 2021 sought to address this question among some selected communities around Uganda.  The 578m (sh2.2trillion) fund has bankrolled 120 projects and focused on transport, food security and agriculture.

While handouts can give the temporary and artificial effect of improved income, to increase income sustainably, one has to increase their value to the society. You do that by adding to your knowledge and experience. In the video above the turnaround in Laurence Kayeswa’s life from petty criminal to in-demand tailor is an apt illustration.

He learnt how to be a tailor, a skill clearly valued in and around he slums of Bwaise going by the success he has had in building a steady, reliable income, that he uses to support himself and family.

It may be of added advantage to teach him some business skills, that would help scale up his enterprise, serve more people and earn him more money. But for now, he is out of poverty and as a minimum target this was achieved.

The farmers of Mount Elgon Coffee and Honey Cooperative were an interesting example of how communities can be transformed. Already coffee farmers by the time an EU affiliated project the Market Access Upgrade Porgram (MARKUP), knocked on their door, its probable that they were only just making ends meet.

Under the program the coffee farmers were not only helped improve their farms, through improved coffee husbandry methods but were also encouraged to keep bees to improve their coffee farms and as anew revenue stream.

But beyond that, the project organized them into a cooperative that allows them to negotiate better terms from suppliers, bulk their produce and even add value. Value addition should mean the farmer would get a greater proportion of the shelf price for his crop.

User-owned cooperatives, if managed properly are an effective means of ensuring producers get a fair shake from the market. Many times our poverty is a function of our inability to aggregate our resources, be it land, labour or capital.

Similar benefits were seen among the cocoa farmers in Bundibugyo where MARKUP is present.

It is still early days to assess the long-term impact of these initiatives on their respective communities -- there are still thieves coming out of Bwaise and poverty continues to ravage the slopes of Mount Egon and Bundibugyo, but the basic principles are sound.

The EDF has done another important thing for these communities, creating examples from which the communities can learn. By designing the individuals and farmer organisations to stand alone, it is likely that the projects cannot only be self-sustaining but can be self-perpetuating in the surrounding societies.

It will be interesting to return to these individuals ten-, 20-years from now and see what has become of them. We may be pleasantly surprised.

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