Collaborative Efforts towards Sustainable Agriculture Development
My interests are tailored around the 1 and 2 SDG agenda on income, food and nutritional security for smallholder farmers in developing countries context. My whole life, I have desired to extend a service to people especially the less privileged so I can realize an inclusive, free of hunger and sustainable world even when I know I don’t have enough resources to do it, I will still give in my best shot. I have a three year experience in community based and participatory approaches on micro agricultural systems.
As part of my graduate training with International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Uganda working directly with the farmers, I noticed that they are entrapped to an environmentally unsustainable production, even more with the challenges faced due to climatic change among limited access to agricultural inputs and extension services. I believe in developing a resilient, sustainable and viable integrated agricultural production that links key local stakeholders such as crop and livestock farmers to other players like research and market institutions while creating scores of job opportunities for youth and women along agricultural value chains.
I recently co-founded a community based organization- KIBOGA-KYANKWANZI INNOVATION YOUTH AGRIPRENEURS that works with youth and women in Agriculture at the forefront of decision making on what kind of services they think would move them forward. This captivates around forming an innovation platform bringing key stakeholders in Agricultural Research and Development such as Researchers, Financial Institutions, Markets and Marketing Information, Agricultural Input dealers, government and Non government organizations. The essence of innovation platform is to bridge knowledge and resource gap between farmers and Public-Private sectors that is crucial for fostering collaboration among different stakeholders. This gives an opportunity to farmers to organize structures that would instill collective efforts to access capacity building and training and offer a high bargaining power for their agricultural produce.
Attempts by our group have been made towards an integrated agricultural value added chain of maize and soybean micro enterprises. Focus on maize and soybean value chains is meant to scale out livestock and poultry feeds which aims at substituting use of fish as a protein source for animal feeds. This comes at a time when natural water resources cannot sustainably produce enough fish due to the over exploitation and misuse of lakes that has endangered the ecosystem. We are trying to embark on improving the quality and quantity of sustainable production and productivity of maize and soybean and then refocus on value addition of the target crops to gain a reasonable market value and share targeting urban markets through improved processing methods, packaging and branding.
In August I will be joining a pool of talents with interest in food security at UNLEASH in Denmark so we can forge ways on how Private Public Partnerships are influential towards creating an enabling environment for sustainable Agriculture development at smallholder level. I look forward to meeting hundreds of young and innovative minds to share my idea and learn from theirs so as to discover new and workable insights and create disruptive solutions towards sustainable development goals making the world a safe and better place.
