Planting the

Ronan Scully reports on how Self Help Africa is empowering farming communities in Uganda

IT takes two days to travel from my home in rural Ireland to the rural poor families with whom Self Help Africa works with in Uganda. But in other respects it’s a journey that may as well be a million miles.

After two days of travel, your eyes are heavy and your legs are stiff but your mind is racing. You cannot but question how come there are people living in such poverty. What can I do to help?

I made this journey recently with a group of Self Help Africa supporters who had all undertaken an array of different fundraisers to cover the costs of the trip.

We were there to compete in the 2018 edition of a 10k road race in Kampala, the capital, and then travel northwards to visit projects and communities supported by Self Help Africa.

We hear a lot about the changes that Africa is going through, and make no mistake there is change happening on a monthly basis. In Uganda, almost everyone is connected by mobile phone, the internet is spreading to the remotest corners of the nation and a technological transformation is taking place.

Yet the biggest challenge — poverty — is apparent everywhere. Children are barefoot and in rags, schools are dirtfloored and overcrowded, and electricity is often not much more than a bare bulb hanging from a ceiling.

Life expectancy in Uganda recently reached 60 years of age. By our standards that is extremely low, but when you consider that it was 52 a decade ago, that is evidence of significant change.

Rural unemployment is alarmingly high, and basic services such as sanitation, healthcare and education are way behind what we should expect in any country in the 21st century.

Wherever you go the ravages of AIDS are evident. Go into any school and ask how many children have only one parent, or no parent and you would be astounded.

Uganda’s population is 40 million and there are as many as 1.2 million AIDS orphans. It is the silent killer that sweeps through offices, villages, banks, schools and government institutions.

Many businesses refuse to give employees time off for more than one funeral a month because death comes so frequently to families.

Against this background, Self Help Africa is committed to reducing poverty and hunger, by focusing on agriculture.

Our work involves both the capacity of small farms to produce the food that a family might need, and the capacity of the land to generate an income from which the household can invest in food, clothing, school fees and other necessities.

On our trip we visited a wide variety of communities and households and saw at first hand the impact that the simplest activities can have on ordinary daily life.

Introducing farmers to new crop varieties, helping families set up their own vegetable plots, and promoting new breeds of goats, pigs and poultry are simple supports that are slowly but surely changing people’s lives.

There is also a strong focus on training and education to empower farmers to make changes in their lives. It’s why we are called ‘Self Help’.

Farmers everywhere can be risk averse. In Africa, where the stakes are high and the margin for error is narrow, it’s understandable. It takes courage and belief to try something new.

After all, if a new farming activity doesn’t work out, or a crop you know nothing about fails, there could be lives on the line.

That’s why it’s important that the training that is provided is spot on, and the people providing the learning gain the trust of farmers and their families.

Self Help Africa achieves that in part by identifying and supporting community-based ‘lead farmers’ in the villages where we work.

We also establish demonstration plots to provide farming households with evidence to show them the potential of various crops, composts and growing methods. ‘Lead farmers’ — men and women from the community — are given the training and support on their own small farms.

They then become vil- lage-based advisors who can help and support others with similar activities.

As we travelled recently around the country we saw evidence of this kind of work, and other practical examples of how Self Help Africa is making a difference in Uganda.

Community-based storage depots, where rural poor families can deposit their crops for collection and transport to market, is a simple but important step in many communities.

In the far north of the country, a new Self Help Africa project is helping to train 3,000 young people.

The objective is to give them