Inclusive agriculture for Ugandan refugees - NaijaAgroNet

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Agriculture gives refugees an opportunity to earn a living and make new friends along the way.

When Betty Ocira Acayo arrived in northern Uganda with her five children, her first concern was where she and her family would live – followed closely by how she would feed them.
Betty’s family crossed the border in 2016, alongside over 500,000 other people, mostly women and children, fleeing violent conflict in South Sudan. The Government of Uganda welcomed families like Betty’s, providing a home for her family in Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement and a 40x40 metre plot of land for her to farm. While Betty had some experience of kitchen gardening, many refugees from South Sudan arriving in Uganda had primarily been livestock keepers, with limited experience of farming.

Many of the 1.5 million refugees in Uganda are in the same situation as Betty – they have been displaced outside of their country for longer than five years, and they don’t know when it will be safe for them to return home.

Despite the inclusive policies that grant refugees land for farming as well as the right to work and move freely in Uganda, a lack of economic opportunities means that more than half of refugees continue to rely on emergency distributions of food and cash to meet their basic needs. Over 90 percent of refugees are highly economically vulnerable, with more than one third experiencing food insecurity.

Refugees have long said that relying on emergency assistance is not a long-term solution. They wish to become self-reliant and simply need the tools and skills to do so.

In that light, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) invests in self-reliance for the benefit of everyone – from the country and communities that host refugees, who are often themselves food insecure, to the refugees, who can build skills to support their livelihoods in their place of displacement or back home, should it become safe to return there.

Betty was invited to join FAO’s Refugee Agricultural Value Chains for Economic Self Reliance project. Funded by the IKEA Foundation, the project’s goal is to build sustainable livelihoods for both refugees living in the Kiryandongo settlement and Ugandans living in the neighboring communities around it.

Through the project, Betty joined an FAO-implemented Farmer Field School where, by working on an experimental garden side-by-side with other refugees and Ugandans, she learned effective agricultural techniques, including vertical gardening, to maximize the space in her plot. She also learned irrigation techniques that require less water, an important consideration in water-scarce Kiryandongo.

Participants were also provided with chickens and taught to keep them. The eggs served as a needed source of protein or income for many families. In addition to crops for her family’s consumption, Betty and the other Farmer Field School participants were given seeds and learned how to grow passion fruit specifically to sell.

In South Sudan, Betty had only grown crops for her family to eat. In contrast, the Farmer Field School in Kiryandongo promoted building skills related to business development, marketing and financial literacy. This helped Betty and the other farmers in her group formalize and register with the district local government, which opens up access to additional financing, including government grants.

They have also formed a savings group that allows members to put away money collectively and lend to members for emergencies or for investment back into their agricultural businesses.

For Betty and the other women who make up 70 percent of participants, the project has been transformative. When Betty’s husband died in South Sudan, her family lost their breadwinner. Now she has taken on that role, selling passion fruit, eggplant and other vegetables in the local market, keeping money aside for emergencies and using the rest to feed her children.

“I realize that the skills I have gained have changed my life,” says Betty. She even shares these new skills with others in the settlement: “Many others come to learn from me.”

The passion fruit crop has proven popular in the local market, and if in the future the new farmers scale up production, FAO will be able to connect them to larger buyers from the capital who can buy the fruit in bulk. This will further increase the sustainability of the passion fruit value chain in Uganda and improve the economic outcomes for farmers.

In the meantime, beyond self-reliance, the project is also contributing to the peaceful coexistence of refugees and their host communities. It is not uncommon for tensions to arise between refugees and local communities, especially over access to natural resources like water and trees and an imbalance in humanitarian and development assistance between the groups. FAO is working with the Government of Uganda to address the root causes of these tensions by creating sustainable forestry management plans and promoting the use of alternative energy sources.

Meanwhile, the project is also helping to improve the relationship between the groups, specifically by including host communities in all of the project activities and creating mixed Farmer Field School groups of Ugandans and refugees so that they can learn new skills from each other and collaborate towards a common goal.

In the course of growing and selling produce, host community members and refugees work together in mutually beneficially ways, and the overall improvement in financial security for both groups has helped to alleviate tensions.

As the number of refugees living globally approaches 37 million and the average length of time that a refugee is displaced is 20 years, governments need new strategies to ensure refugees are living dignified lives, not stuck in limbo without the prospect of a long-term solution. In Kiryandongo and in refugee settlements worldwide, there is a huge opportunity to unlock the full potential of agriculture to help people address their own needs and improve their lives.

*Contributed by FAO/Vincent Tremeau including photo/Editor