Food production in Acholi / West Nile region, Northern Uganda is constrained by labour constraints, unsustainable soil fertility management and vulnerability to climate change. Consequently, rural households are food insecure and trends are that their access to food will worsen further. Some farmers have themselves developed a range of promising initiatives in the domain of Conservation Agriculture (CA). This research project will first establish the relationship between these promising initiatives, the productivity of the farming systems, and the sustainability and resilience of its land management. Secondly, the project will identify and develop methods for improving the effectiveness, sustainability and resilience of the local CA initiatives. This will be done with the local farmers and rural extension services, in various rounds of participatory on-farm field testing, evaluations and fine-tuning. Thirdly, capacity building trajectories will be pursued for extension services and best methods will be incorporated in the farmer support and dissemination mechanisms.

This project will improve the functioning, integration, and inclusiveness of seed systems and markets in Uganda by strengthening links between the regulatory framework, seed providers, and seed users across multiple dimensions. The project is a timely intervention designed to leverage the rapid growth in Uganda’s market opportunities for seeds, traits, and agricultural commodities while addressing the persistent market and institutional failures that limit the transmission of information between smallholder farmers and seed providers. Ultimately, the project will advance seed system development in Uganda by providing realistic, evidence-based policy options that accelerate crop-specific development, production, and marketing of new varieties and quality seeds to smallholders across the country. Emphasis will be placed on filling three critical knowledge gaps in the country’s policy discourse on seed systems. First, the project will identify factors constraining the demand for seeds and traits across a range of informal and formal seed systems (represented by different crops), farmer typologies (with special attention to gender and youth), and agro-ecologies (representing variation in climate vulnerability), and test strategies designed to relax these constraints in the field. Second, the project will analyse the productive and innovative capacity of seed providers across Uganda, including foreign firms, domestic companies, small- and medium-sized enterprises, farmer organizations, and individual farmer-entrepreneurs, and test policy and regulatory interventions to increase this capacity. Third, the project will engage with strategic decision-makers to analyse how policies, investment, and regulatory solutions that expand inclusive access to—and the benefits from—new varieties and quality seed can be implemented. Taken together, research on these three topics will provide new and salient insights to encourage growth in opportunities for farmers, entrepreneurs, and investors.

The uptake of quality assured maize seed by smallholder farmers is persistently low, this despite the fact that the seed has a much higher yield potential and is often more drought tolerant than the varieties traditionally grown by farmers. Just over 15% of Ugandan farmers buy quality assured maize seed from the formal seed market, the rest rely mostly on home-saved seed and low quality products from the local market. This research project investigates the adoption for drought tolerant maize varieties that have been specifically developed for specific agro-ecological zones in Uganda by CIMMYT and partners and looks into barriers for uptake of advanced seed technology, specifically focussing on downside risk. We assess the inhibiting role of downside risk with regard to productive investments by conducting randomized controlled trials to test the effects of bundling index insurance with drought tolerant maize varieties on willingness-to-pay and uptake of this maize seed.

Poverty levels in the northern Uganda remain the highest in the nation. Rice, a strategic crop in the national agricultural development strategy and a key crop in the multi-annual-strategic plan of the Dutch Embassy in Kampala has very low average yields from farmlands in northern Uganda. In the region, smallholder rice farmlands are cultivated every season with little soil nutrient replenishment. The land is often left un-utilized in between rice crops resulting in reduced land productivity. We propose to introduce greengram in rice cropping system to increase land productivity, improve soil fertility, and enhance farmer’s income and nutrition among women and youth. We will also evaluate use of rhizobia inoculum to inoculate greengram and develop farmer-centred seed production and business. An ICT-enabled knowledge sharing framework will be established to enhance farmers’ information access. Up-to 1,500 smallholder farmers will be assisted to improve their household incomes, food and nutrition security