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With relevant examples, assess the performance of youth enterprises in Uganda from 2019 to date.
Youth engagement in agriculture
To incentivize more youth to get involved in the agricultural sector, there is need to enhance their capacity with the skills and knowledge in modern agronomic practices. While this is been partially address in the secondary school curriculum, it tends to be more theoretical than practical with less regard of the reality of rural farming situation in Uganda. Similarly, more youth continue to abandon the sector as they climb more academic ladders. For instance, while the attainment of primary education reduces the probability of agricultural uptake by 3.2%; attaining a UACE certificate translates to up to 20% reduction. A strategy that for instance incentivizes the middle class young population already employed in other sectors of the economy to get involved in agricultural would go a long way to increase food security whilst creating economic benefits for the youth along the chain.
Uganda’s agricultural potential will continue to be thwarted if participation remains crippled at the low ends of the value-chain facilitated by large raw material exportation. The report advocates for a demand led approach with a focus on adding value to agricultural outputs and therefore creating a more sophisticated range of secondary agricultural products on the national and international markets.
The land tenure system in Uganda also continues to impede many youth from engaging in agriculture. With only 50% of Ugandans having access to land (UBOS 2015), a structural bottleneck is created which limits participation in the sector. The land question is even made more difficult by the considerably low number of land owners. Disrupting this current structure of land tenure will go a long way in incentivising the youth who are the most victims. More specifically, efforts which empower women to own, not just access land as a means of production is crucial for agricultural sector development. The paper also advocates for the strengthening of the cooperative movement which will strengthen small farmers’ networks and create a platform for increased production and marketing.
Youth unemployment continues to be a developmental challenge not only in Uganda but in several sub Saharan countries. At least 64 percent of the total unemployed persons are youth aged 18-30 years. As the government struggles to look for solutions to the unemployment challenge, one approach has been the promotion of self-employment through the establishment of National Youth Funds. Specifically, the Youth Venture Capital Fund (UYVCF) worth UGX 25bn (about US$ 10 million) was introduced in 2011 and more recently, in September 2013, government significantly boosted youth schemes by allocating UGX 265 billion (about US$ 100 million) to the Youth Livelihood Programme (YLP) over a five-year period. The major pillars of these initiatives are: enterprise development, job creation and business skills training and development.
Youth unemployment continues to be a developmental challenge in several African countries despite the positive economic growth rates experienced over the past decade. There are indicators that this growth has not generated sufficient and decent employment opportunities for the youth (AfDB et al., 2012; UNECA, 2011). As a result, unemployment, working poverty, vulnerable employment and underemployment are widespread amongst Africa’s youth. Moreover, demographics indicate that Africa is going through a youth bulge with a large proportion of its population below 25 years of age (Kararach, 2011). This demographic shift presents opportunities for a growth dividend if combined with the right capital and technology – as the case of East Asia – but it can also represent a major threat (Brooks et al., 2012). Insufficient employment opportunities amidst a rapidly growing young labor force can lead to social unrest and political instability (Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development (MoGLSD),2011; Page, 2012). The difficulties faced by young people in most developing countries in finding work are attributed to limited expansion of employment opportunities, skills mismatches and limited or no work experience (AfDB et al., 2012). As a result, most African youth engage in low quality informal sector jobs. The informal sector accounts for about 90 percent of the jobs created in the continent (World Bank, 2009).
Pig farming among the youths in Uganda
Pig farming is widely practiced in all regions of Uganda with high concentrations around the Central region. Unlike other key agricultural enterprises, pig farming has experienced fundamental improvement in the number of pigs reared and households that rear at least one pig over the last three decades. This has been possible despite the limited government support to the pig subsector and the fact that pigs are not considered among the 20 priority sub-programs of the country’s Agricultural Sector Development Strategy and Investment Plan (DSIP). This notwithstanding, about 17.8% (i.e. 1.1 millions) of all households own at least one pig in Uganda. The number of pigs increased from 0.19 million in 1980 to 3.2 million in 2008.
The current daily consumption of pigs (pigs slaughtered per day) in Kampala city alone is estimated to be between 300 and 500. These include about 75-80 pigs that are slaughtered at the main pig abattoir of Wambizi cooperative society in Nalukolongo in Kampala city. The per capita consumption of pork is 3.4 kg/person/year, the highest in the region. This level of consumption is reported to have increased 10 times more than it used to be 30 years ago. The market for pig products along the pig value chain is however disorganized, has many value chain actors, and many service providers, whose activities are not well coordinated.
Most smallholder pig farmers and other pig value chain actors have limited access to: inputs, technical advice, insurance, credit and other financial services, and reliable output markets. This is attributed to various constraints in the pig value chain that range from lack of: local processes that create capacity through enabling and facilitating learning; necessary local architecture that includes catalysts of change; appropriate forums to consider and address specific problems; mechanisms to ensure farmers’ and other value chain actors’ group action; strategies that help to overcome unforeseen obstacles, and; organization strategies to achieve economies of scale.
Other constraints to improved performance include: poor access to market information, low farm-gate prices, high transaction costs, poor quality and adulterated feeds, lack of functional partnerships with other committed partners, poor access to extension services, lack of access to financial services, limited (agri)-business development services, limited
scale of market oriented pig farming, lack of trust among value chain actors, lack of innovation and policy advocacy platforms. There is need for institutional innovations and interventions that address and help overcome these market failures, if actors in the pig value chain are to overcome these constraints and have improved access to better services and market for inputs and pig outputs.
In particular, the underlying factors that often lead to the lack of functional partnerships with committed partners in any research for development intervention may include, among others the failure: of research service providers to draw upon institutional innovation that minimize inefficiency; to appreciate that the traditional approach of linear agricultural research for development, extension, and adoption often creates underperforming partnerships; to test and validate the best practices in a multi-stakeholder agricultural research approach (the inability to embrace active research mode in partnership with other willing stakeholders); to build partnerships that aim at creating capacity in the agricultural sector based on trust and knowledge sharing; to agree on important issues such as the roles and objectives of different partners, by-laws, common priorities of development, and the nature of implementation of action plans, and; to create space for boundary partners to come in with their experiences, resources, and skills that all vital in catalyzing the formation of vibrant and self-sustaining partnership.
The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) through its Kampala based office is implementing an IFAD funded Smallholder Pig Value Chains Development (SPVCD) project in Uganda. The main objective of the SPVCD project is to improve livelihoods, incomes, and assets of smallholder pig producers, particularly women. The question is whether this objective can be achieved in a manner that is sustainable, through interventions that increase productivity, reduce risk, and improve market access in pig value chains.
Specifically, the SPVCD project aims at: (i) identifying market opportunities for pork in Uganda, and the multiple factors preventing smallholder pig producers from exploiting existing opportunities, with focus on constraints caused by among others: animal disease threat, feed resources, and performance of markets and services; (ii) developing and pilot testing a set of integrated packages for smallholder pig production and market access for specific production systems, resource profiles and market settings in Uganda, and;(iii) documenting, communicating and promoting appropriate evidence-based models for sustainable, pro-poor pig value chains.
In the last one and half years, ILRI Kampala office has made a milestone toward the effort to achieve the above SPVCD objectives. For example: the situational analysis of the smallholder pig value chains in Uganda has been accomplished; research sites for the project have been selected; there has been a successful scoping of committed partners and actors’ landscape; stakeholders have and continue to be engaged in sharing experiences and the way forward; appropriate research methods and tools for conducting the pig value chain assessment were selected; literature reviews and the in-depth assessment of the smallholder pig value chains in Uganda has been accomplished. This report therefore makes a contribution to the process of identifying relevant best practices through the desk review of literature. A number of existing best practices that have been tested in similar environments can be modified, adopted, adapted and piloted in the research sites of the smallholder pig value chains project. This helps to generate evidence of proof and potential of these concepts before recommending their scaling- out and replication.
Best-bet interventions (best practices) on activities of all actors in the wider pig value chains and service providers can help to make a significant contribution to the achievement of the project objectives and desired outcomes. This is true, if BBIs can stimulate: positive changes in the behaviour of value chain actors; new way of doing things; institutional reform to accompany relevant technological changes and transfer; new kinds of “horizontal” connectivity necessary for healthy innovation systems that cannot be resisted for cultural reasons; the need to maintain grades and standards within the pig value chain;
improvement in farmers’ bargaining power through the development of their human capital and social capital through sustained facilitation to form associations; training in modern marketing; fostering the emergence of farmer organizations, and the forging of new actions or relationships that increase benefits while reducing the embedded costs. Besides, the outcomes of the BBIs can provide a reliable justification for resource mobilization to enable further scaling-out of successful interventions that increase pig productivity, market efficiency, and value addition.
This report documents potential best-bet interventions (BBI) that can be tested in pilot research areas for the SPVCD project. It answers the following research questions: (i) what are the relevant institutional innovations undertaken at the local level by the private and public actors to enable improvement in access to: services, inputs, and output markets for smallholder pig value chains? (ii) what are the prevailing factors that contribute to the successes and failures of such innovations, and constraints of these institutional innovations and their general implementation in the country?, and: (iii) which of the past and prevailing institutional innovations for improving access to services and input and output markets can be adopted and adapted as potential best-bet intervention at the local level and in line with the objectives of the smallholder pig value chains project? Noteworthy is that BBI’s that promote access to services, inputs and output market, actually act as a catalyst to enhance adoption of some of the technological innovations.
Notice that BBIs or “the likely project interventions targeted for each project site or community” will leverage local efforts to address the likely constraints and opportunities faced by smallholder pig producers, especially women and other resource poor groups in the community. In this study, potential BBIs are derived from various sources. These include: the scanty social-economic literature on institutional innovation in sub-Saharan Africa; findings from the recent situational analysis on the smallholder pig value chains in Uganda, and; findings from the recent pig value chain assessment in Uganda. The BBIs highlights different actors that need to be targeted with capacity building, the type of capacities that need to be built, and how these capacities need to be built, in order to ensure a sustainable, profitable, and well-coordinated pig value chains and reliable business models for development.
