Demand-driven and Cost Effective Production: What the Farmers Ought to know. A case of Local Chicken Enterprise in Masindi District-Uganda

Most African communities depend on agriculture for both income generation and food security and yet farming has faced and is still confronted with a lot of production and market related hardships. Despite all these constraints, farmers are stuck on agriculture as it’s the only definite way of earning a living. The mistake farmers and other agricultural practitioners continuously make is to produce first and look for the market later. This is where buyers and the middle men in particular exploit and a conclusion is eventually made by the producer that,” there is no money in agriculture.” Farmers including those who want to reap from agriculture need to first change their attitudes towards it and secondly produce what the markets are demanding at particular point in time. This therefore calls for institutionally guided farmer market research, enterprise selection, experimentation and enterprise development. Farmers can only benefit from agricultural production after carefully understanding what the buyer wants as in the type of the commodity, size, quantity, quality, frequency of supply, conditions of supply and the price the buyer is willing to offer among others. Where the selected enterprise has very high costs of production, the farmer should minimize costs buy substituting some inputs with local materials and also negotiate for a premium price and sign contracts with the buyers. Two farmer research groups in Masindi district in Uganda went through the above processes and have got success stories to tell.Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Farm Management, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, International Relations/Trade, Marketing, Productivity Analysis, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Relationship between Social Capital and Livelihood Enhancing Capitals among Smallholder Farmers in Uganda

Social capital is an important characteristic of a community and is one of the components of the asset pentagon of the sustainable livelihood framework. The study aimed at assessing the levels and dimensions of social capital and how social capital influences other livelihood capitals. A Cross-sectional survey of a random sample of 208 households was conducted in Masindi and Hoima Districts in Uganda to assess the current livelihood conditions and strategies for improving rural livelihoods. An Index of social capital was generated using density of group membership and three levels of social capital where generated i.e. high, medium and low. Two dimensions of social capital (bonding and bridging) were considered. Results showed that households with high and medium social capital had enhanced skills to solve problems, do research and bargain with middle men. Social capital empowered more women to participate in decision making, fostered asset base creation and use of natural resource management technologies. There was a significant difference between level of social capital and participation in collective farming. Households with high social capital rated highly the community level of trust, reciprocity, and women’s confidence. However, there was no significant effect of social capital on household income. In conclusion, there was a positive relationship between level and dimension of social capital and access to livelihood assets implying that strengthening social capital is a powerful way to improve communities and requires consistent and effective approaches to build and reinforce the social and human capital.Relationship, Social Capital, Livelihood Capitals, Smallholder Farmers, Agricultural Finance, Consumer/Household Economics, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Health Economics and Policy, Labor and Human Capital, Marketing, Production Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Assessment of the impacts of farmer participation in farmer research groups in the highlands of Kabale, Uganda

The African Highlands Initiative (AHI) is promoting community-based participatory research approaches using farmer research groups (FRG) to catalyse farmer participation in research, and to widen the impact of participatory research. However, there is dearth of systematic empirical studies that evaluates the quality of participation in FRGs, and their impacts. This report summarises the results of an empirical study that investigated the types of participatory research that occurred at the different stages of the research process, how farmer participation occurred, who participates in FRG, what are the factors that determined farmers' participation in FRG, and what criteria to use in monitoring and evaluating the performance of FRG. Results showed that the types of participation were more of functional consultative and collaborative types, but varied in the different stages of the research process as farmers were increasingly taking on more roles and responsibilities. Farmer participation in FRG tend to follow a "U" shaped curve, with high participation at the initial stages of the process, followed by dramatic decrease as many farmers drop out from the groups, and slow increases towards the end of the first seasons. Similarly, there was a significantly higher participation of male farmers at the beginning of the process, compared to women. However, as FRGs progressed, the proportion of men decreased while the relative proportion of women increased dramatically to reach about 67% of farmers in mixed groups, and 24% of the FRGs were women only. These results suggest that FRG proved to be a more effective mechanism to involve women and the resource-poor farmers in research who would otherwise be bypassed by conventional approaches. The results of the Logit regression model confirmed that the probability of participating in FRG was higher for women compared to men, and that there were no significant differences in wealth circumstances between FRG members and the rest of the community. We argue that FRG as an approach has a great potential for catalyzing the participation of farmers as partners in research and development activities. However, this requires significant support and personal commitment of researchers to broaden the scope of FRGs from a functional consultative type to a more collegial empowering type, and from variety evaluation to broader natural resources management research and other developmental issues