An Intro to Kampala – Urban Agriculture & Traffic

In my everyday life, I know I take a lot for granted: in addition to the big things, like my health, my family, friends, etc., I also don’t think twice about indoor bathrooms and drinkable tap water. Honestly, I’m grateful for my past ability to travel so much that small differences like those are quite easy to adjust to. However, in Kampala, the most difficult thing for me to get used to is the traffic. I’ve never been so incredibly appreciative of the L train in Chicago. Or stoplights…

 

I’m staying with a wonderful, caring host family, where I have a plethora of family members looking out for me and providing me with touches of home—like leftover birthday cake this morning (a tradition in my own family, of course!). However, I must admit I was slightly naïve in not figuring out where exactly they live before I arrived. This morning, I woke up at six, maybe slightly offended my host sister by skipping the bucket (shower) she offered to fill up for me, ate my breakfast as quickly as possible (a more difficult task than expected since the peanut butter here is a bit more…sticky…than I’m used to), and sped walked past the schoolchildren on my way to the common form of public transportation here, a matutu, or “taxi.”

 

It’s now 7:48, and my taxi is inching towards the Old Car Park in the city center. I suppose the Old Car Park is the Grand Central-equivalent in Kampala (just substitute trains with taxis). Or maybe it’s more like Penn Station… Regardless, it’s where thousands of taxis congregate in the city center. The giant parking lot is filled with signs denoting different loading “stages,” which state in what direction the taxis lined up behind it are heading. The next taxi to leave gets a more specific sign placed on top of it until it is appropriately filled and heads out. Each taxi has fourteen seats and thus, legally fits fourteen people. Not so legally, it fits way more…

 

In regards to my research on food systems here, however, I’ve found that “informal” is a more respectful and appropriate term to use than “illegal”—specifically when referring to unlicensed street vendors and markets. So, I’d rather say that taxi I came to town in this morning was just… very informal.

 

Also in regards to my research on food systems, just within my first few days here, I’ve learned an incredible amount. Before I arrived in Kampala, I read a lot about the significance of urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) to the city’s food supply—that is, the large proportion of food it supplied to the city. Then, in my first two days here, many qualified researchers and scientists informed me that 95 percent of the city’s food supply comes from beyond the city’s urban and peri-urban areas.[1] When I first heard this, I was a bit taken aback—I thought a large research pivot was at bay. However, over the past few days, I’ve learned more and more about the significance of UPA to the city’s food supply and food security, beyond the simply the amount of food it provides.

 

In case you didn’t check out that handy dandy table I included in my last blog post, my definition of food security includes four key criteria:

1. Physical availability of food
2. Economic and physical access to food
3. Nutrition of consumption practices (and access to a variety of nutritious food)
4. Availability/access to safe food
5. Stability of the other four dimensions

 

UPA may currently comprise only five percent of Kampala’s food supply, yet it certainly increases people’s economic and physical access to a diverse variety of healthy foods, given that the most popular UPA products are vegetables and poultry. Certain government programs also promote UPA to increase specific, vulnerable urban communities’ food security. Other government programs train urban and peri-urban farmers how to maximize UPA production in very limited spaces. Complementary private and government-sponsored research to Kampala’s UPA developments also increase the reliability of urban and peri-urban farmers’ yields despite climate uncertainty, severe weather events, and land development pressures.

 

Despite my misconceptions regarding how much food UPA sources to Kampala, the city still serves as a baseline for my research: unlike in my other study cities, most of Kampala’s food supply is sourced domestically. Every person whom I ask about the food system here invariably begins describing to me the distinct agricultural regions throughout the country. Each region has a certain food it produces, which is determined by people’s preferences and the natural environment (but mostly the natural environment). In fact, one researcher at the Kampala Capital City Authority’s agricultural research center, Kyanja, said that’s how he would define a “local food system” in Uganda: by the crops/livestock a certain region produces.

 

Once crops are harvested in regions throughout Uganda, they are typically brought by distributors to be sold at key markets around the city, like Owino, Nakasero, and Kalerwe Markets. Crops that require processing, like grains and corn, are also brought to the city to be processed, and livestock are brought to the city to be slaughtered. After processing, these food products are distributed to markets within Kampala and back out to the regions from which they came. There are many possible distribution routes for all food products once they arrive at the key city markets: they can be sold to individuals, restaurants, hotels, or other secondary market distributors, and then the chain continues… Yet despite the seeming complexity of these city food chains, the very common farmer-distributor-market seller-household/restaurant/hotel food supply chain is still extremely streamlined compared relative to how food gets distributed to supermarkets in the US, for example.

 

In my first week here, I’ve spoken to a number of researchers, government officials, and program coordinators involved in urban agriculture in Kampala, at the following organizations:

 

**Please note that the following sections ended up being way longer than I initially intended, so … TL;DR

 

National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO), Kawanda Branch –

 

• I interviewed soil scientists who aim to increase climate-smart farming throughout Uganda, and thus contribute to the country’s food security amidst environmental change and uncertainty by conducting research through direct engagement with farmers in urban and peri-urban areas.
• These researchers also explained to me how the food systems within Uganda is like a spider web with Kampala as the agricultural processing and distribution center: food comes in from specialized rural agricultural regions to Kampala and then redistributed back out. Therefore, food is widely available in Kampala, even if it is not physically and economically accessible to all residents.

Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) Community Involvement & Gender Department, Kampala Division –

 

• The KCCA’s Department of Agribusiness runs a program that targets vulnerable communities throughout Kampala, and provides them with comprehensive financial, technical, and advisory support for them to start their own urban agriculture enterprises.
• Two key challenges to the program include land development pressure (given that many program beneficiaries do not own the land they farm on) and accessibility of authorized, efficient food distribution channels for the beneficiaries to sell their food to. To overcome that second challenge, the KCCA encourages the development of neighborhood farmers’ cooperatives, since urban farmers joined together can gain access to formal markets that individual, small-scale, urban farmers can’t. However, these cooperatives have not yet been realized.

 

KCCA Kyanja Agricultural Resource Center –

 

• The goal of KCCA’s Kyanja Agricultural Resource Center is to train urban farmers how to best grow crops in small spaces, to ultimately increase urban farmers’ productivity and secure their income.
• Kyanja provides a sort of marketplace for urban farmers from all over the city to buy high quality agricultural products and inputs, and it also provides a wide arrange of extension services. It trains all sorts of urban farmers (no matter their income) on best practices related to poultry, piggery, aquaponics (to raise catfish), mushroom growing, and vegetable growing.
• Kyanja hopes to soon provide farmers with increased access to proper food distribution networks, which may occur at the center and in poultry distribution centers, which program coordinators hope to develop in each district.
• When I was touring Kyanja, the Director of Communications at the KCCA bought two chickens and 44 catfish, and he put them in his trunk for the car ride home (the catfish in two plastic bags).

NARO, Mukono Branch –

 

• NARO Mukono’s urban agriculture program aims to teach UPA farmers how to maximize the productivity of vegetable growing on small plots of agricultural land to provide the farmers with future food, income, and employment. They do so through community-based training and providing more comprehensive support to select urban farmers.
• Since the project’s inception, the NARO Mukono team, along with its community based organization partners and support from local agricultural and political leaders, has trained 5,000 farmers and provided 20,000 farmers with free urban farming materials.
• To combat the same, previously discussed, issues with lack of available, formal markets for urban farmers, the NARO Mukono urban agriculture team dedicates a large portion of their time to assisting farmers in finding potential markets for their products, such as formal food markets or direct buyers at places like universities and restaurants.

_____

 

 

And if you are still reading, I wish you sincere congratulations. But also, please feel free to ditch at any time. I will not be offended. It’s past 10 pm here, so it’s certainly my own bedtime, and perhaps it’s yours too…

 

And here’s the full version—woohoo:

 

National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) – Kawanda

 

I was privileged to have my first interview in Kampala with a team of soil scientists at NARO’s Kawanda branch. NARO’s mission is “to enhance the contribution of agricultural research to sustainable agricultural productivity, sustained competitiveness, economic growth, food security, and poverty eradication.” The researchers I spoke with specifically aim to increase climate-smart farming in Uganda. In recent years, they have made great strides to their research away from the lab and instead towards meaningful engagement and interventions with farmers on the farmers’ own land.

 

Indeed, most of NARO Kawanda’s research is focused in agricultural areas—and NARO researchers do not consider urban and peri-urban Kampala an agricultural area. Regardless, the soil scientist team has recently conducted some interventions with urban farmers on a variety of projects, such as sack farming, hydroponics, and mushroom growing.

 

Since my interview with the soil scientists at NARO was my first interview here, the researchers provided me with some general conceptions of the city and its UPA. They explained to me how Kampala’s city boundary was originally delineated as reaching 3 km from the city center, yet it is continuously expanding. They would now describe the city as reaching 15 km from the center.

 

Furthermore, while the researchers emphasized how urban expansion is one of the biggest threats to Kampala’s food system, they also emphasized to me how UPA is still not that important to Kampala’s general food supply… They explained how most of Kampala’s food comes from “deep rural” areas, which are more than 100 km away from the city. (However, they laughed and told me that if I drove just 30 km away from the city, I would think I was in a very rural area. That was soon confirmed.)

 

Other key insight these researchers (and my research assistant, Ismail) provided me with during our general discussion was about how Uganda’s food networks function more generally—“like a spider web” (i.e., from rural agricultural regions to Kampala and back to other rural regions)! Therefore, food is generally very available in Kampala—and that checks #1 on my list of food security components. Furthermore, food in Kampala is generally more economically and physically accessible than food in nearby towns, given how Kampala is the country’s agricultural distribution center. Nonetheless, food insecurity in Kampala is still a prevalent issue, and that’s where UPA often comes in—it provides a direct supply of food and additional income to urban residents in need.

 

While NARO’s soil scientists’ research was mostly unrelated to UPA, the ultimate goals of their department—to ensure Ugandans with consistent access to sufficient, nutritious food amidst impending environmental change and uncertainty—is quite relevant to my own research. Furthermore, my visit to NARO only began to demonstrate to me the very large quantity of government and private resources in Uganda that are dedicated to increasing and maintaining agricultural productivity throughout the country, both in urban and rural areas.

 

(Next week, I will meet with the women in charge of the Biosciences Department at NARO Kawanda, who will provide me with more specific insight into how researcher hope to increase the nutritional value of food supplies within

 

Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) Community Involvement & Gender Department, Kampala Division –

 

I met with Mugisha Abdu, the Director of Agribusiness and National Agricultural Advisory Service (NAADS) Coordinator for Kampala Central Division,[2] whose position falls under the KCCA’s Community Involvement and Gender Program. The KCCA’s vision is to make Kampala a vibrant, attractive, and sustainable city. According to Mr. Abdu, its key values include land care, innovation, production and markets, and food security, and its mandate is to increase food availability, nutrition, and income security to Kampala residents. The KCCA determines what are appropriate programs to do so by first conducting interventions, through which city officials meet with political, religious, and other community leaders on a neighborhood basis. They inquire as to what exactly people need and develop their community develop programs based on communities’ specific needs.

 

Mr. Abdu has been running the Kampala Central Division’s urban agriculture enterprise since 2012. The program targets vulnerable and disadvantaged communities, such as single women, unemployed youths, elderly people, and people with HIV/AIDS, and aims to increase their food security. KCCA provides select program beneficiaries with comprehensive support for them develop their own urban agricultural enterprise: vegetable farming,[3] mushroom growing, poultry farming, dairy farming, or creating value-added food products. The beneficiaries receive advisory, monetary, and technical support throughout the development and upkeep of their individual enterprises. Ultimately, individuals may either consumer or sell their agricultural products, which increases their direct access to food and provides them with a source of additional income.

 

The KCCA’s agricultural enterprise program has accomplished much over the past five years. The Central Division alone has sponsored 500 beneficiaries, and Mr. Abdu has personally observed many instance in which people’s ownership of these enterprises significantly improved their livelihoods. However, one increasingly pressing challenge to the program’s sustainability and expansion is land development pressure within Kampala.

 

The program aims to provide people with the knowledge, skills, and equipment they need to run a successful agricultural enterprise within a very limited space (e.g. somebody’s backyard or the space between people’s homes and the road). However, given the program’s target beneficiaries—individuals’ vulnerable to food insecurity—the beneficiaries often do not own the land they develop their enterprises on. Therefore, it is common that even program participants’ one-square meter vegetable plots are threatened by the land owners’ future development. Mr. Abdu described numerous cases in which his team went to check on their beneficiaries (ongoing monitoring and support is one key stage of project implementation), and the bountiful chicken coops or vegetable plots they had observed just one week before were gone—and often, the beneficiaries were too.

 

Another challenge to small-scale urban agriculture within Kampala is for urban farmers to gain access to efficient, legal channels to sell their food products through. The small-scale agricultural enterprises that the KCCA sponsors most often do not produce enough food products or provide enough income for the urban farmers to sell to licensed city markets. Many urban farmers overcome this barrier by selling their products through informal means, such as outside the gates of city markets, through small stands on the sides of roads, or at informal markets. The KCCA hopes to mitigate unlicensed product sales by supporting the development of agricultural cooperatives. These cooperatives, through which community residents involved in the same form of agribusiness can connect, would increase the day-to-day support and assistance urban farmers receive. They would also provide small-scale urban farmers the means to sell their products at the major markets within town: while one farmer may not have enough chickens to sell at a large market, all the poultry farmers in a neighborhood certainly would.

 

 

KCCA Kyanja Agricultural Resource Center –

 

The goal of KCCA’s Kyanja Agricultural Resource Center, founded in 2013, is to train urban farmers how to best grow crops in small spaces, to ultimately increase urban farmers’ productivity and secure their income. The center is located on the outskirts of Central Kampala, and it has five main projects: poultry, piggery, aquaponics (to raise catfish), mushroom growing, and vegetable growing. While Kyanja functions largely as a business—it sells each of its agricultural products to urban farmers throughout the city—Kyanja’s mission is rooted in enhancing urban farmers’ livelihoods. Each Wednesday and Sunday, the center is open to the public for trainings on a variety of urban agricultural techniques—e.g. food towers, sack gardens, green houses, aquaponics—and best practices regarding each the types of product it produces itself.

 

However, Kyanja’s work and mission extends far beyond its own site. Kato Godfrey, Head of Crop Science at Kyanja, described how the resource center also provides a variety of extension services to all types of urban farmers (of all incomes) throughout the city. Its team provides personal consultation and monitoring of people’s individual urban farming operations. It also donates supplies to individuals that have demonstrated sufficient resources (capital and land, though the minimum capital requirements are only about 30 USD) and interest in/commitment to their urban farming activities.

 

Mr. Godfrey identifies the greatest barrier for urban farming in Kampala as lack of space. He often meets people who want to begin urban agriculture projects but simply don’t have the few square meters they need to make it worth their while. Nonetheless, he is confidence that the KCCA is well-suited to respond to Kampala residents’ needs and provide them with the other forms of training (e.g. how to bake or make crafts) to continue increasing the city’s food security.

 

On my second visit to Kyanja, during the Saturday open tour hours, I was very privileged to run into two government officials who were touring the center themselves. Throughout the tour, they verbalized their great appreciation for Kyanja’s “illustrious goals” and good work. They also discussed possibilities of future developments to ensure satisfaction for those who visit the center, such as a waiting area and a café.

 

One future development their discussed that I see as a key step in the KCCA’s continued support of small-scale urban agriculture is the development of cold rooms in each city district. District-wide slaughterhouses/distribution centers could overcome current challenges farmers experience in finding proper distribution channels for their agricultural products. Furthermore, Mr. Godfrey hopes to supplement these future cold rooms with development of a formalized system at Kyanja. He hopes farmers will soon be able to all types of agricultural products (not just poultry) directly to the center, and the center could sell them to other buyers. These guaranteed, formalized food networks would increase farmers food security and livelihoods by providing them with reliable access to buyers.

 

 

NARO – Mukono

 

The goal of NARO Mukono’s urban agriculture program is to teach UPA farmers how to maximize the productivity of small plots of agricultural land to provide the farmers with future food, income, and employment. They do so through community-based training and providing more comprehensive support (i.e. supplying materials and continued advisory services) to select urban farmers. NARO focuses primarily on backyard gardening techniques, such as buckets, sacks, food towers, and hanging gardens. The program’s agricultural technician explained why the program focuses on vegetable production: vegetables can be very productive even when grown in small spaces, vegetables grow quickly, vegetable farming’s required inputs are low cost, and vegetables are healthy.

 

Since the project’s inception, the NARO Mukono team, along with its community based organization partners and support from local agricultural and political leaders, has trained 5,000 farmers and provided 20,000 farmers with free materials.

 

To combat the same, previously discussed, issues with lack of available, formal markets for urban farmers, the NARO Mukono center itself assists farmers in finding potential markets for their products. Monica, the program’s agricultural technician, described how she could spend all day on the phone assisting farmers with sales. Despite the time-consuming nature of this part of her job, she has been successful in helping urban farmers connect with formal food markets and in cultivating relationships between urban farmers and other buyers, like universities and restaurants.

 

Monica’s dreams that NARO Mukono will one day train and assist 500,000 urban farmers. She believes also believes it would be very reasonable to source all of Kampala’s vegetables locally, and that that would both increase urban residents’ income and health.

 

[1] I’ve recently encountered a variety of statistics regarding where Kampala’s food is sourced, yet I still have not come across enough information to cross-check the numbers. Regardless, I’m becoming increasingly skeptical of the ‘95 percent’ statistic. For example, one International Development Research Centre (IRDC) sited that 70 percent of poultry found in Kampala is sourced from UPA.

[2] Kampala, Uganda’s capital, is administered by the Kampala Capital City Authority. While there is a “Lord Mayor” of the whole city, the KCCA is also divided into five divisions, each which has its own mayor.

[3] Here and in the following sections, “vegetables” refers to crops like tomatoes, onions, leafy greens, cabbage, carrots, cucumber, etc.