Home on the Range

Display any questionable behaviour as a youth in Uganda and you will be sent to the field for agricultural work as a punishment. You don’t have to be Ivan Pavlov’s dog to know that this behavioural conditioning is going to make the youth grow into adults that associate agricultural work in rural villages with an undesirable profession. As these young men reach the age range of 19-30 years they often inherit and sell their farms for 5 million shillings ($2,500) and use 3 million to buy a bodaboda and move to a major city like Kampala. Once there they spend their remaining funds on rent and food. As the young men who should be working on farms leave for the cities and the elders remain the primary food producers, the cost of food overinflates. Thus you earn a higher wage as a driver but spend up to 95% of your income on expensive food. To further complicate matters, when your bodaboda breaks down or you lose your office job you have no way of feeding your family because you sold your farm and must move into a slum. While farmers living in a rural village do not earn as high of wages, they also do not spend any money on food because they produce everything they eat. While the men in the slums now wish to return to their farms, they have been sold and they never learned how to effectively cultivate them to begin with.  The knowledge has largely been lost and while many researchers in Kampala have done extensive surveys to collect agricultural knowledge, the information is not dispersed or simplified into an easily digestible format for local farmers. The solution is to make farming fun and to present informed agricultural workshops in rural villages and to present farming opportunities to displaced men in the cities.