Hope in a garden

“Hope in a Garden” is part one of a two-part series on sustainable farming techniques practiced in Unbound’s Kampala program.

In the garden, Namuddu pulls weeds from the dark soil between her banana trees.

Next, she’ll spread a homemade composted manure across her garden beds to add a nutrient-rich fertilizer aiding both soil life and plant growth. It’s a simple technique whose full importance she only recently came to appreciate.

Her garden hoe makes a soft thwack as she smacks it deep into a mound of earth, wipes her face with the back of her hand and rests an arm over the top of the tool. Looking out across her farm in Uganda, her eyes take in the lush, vibrant green of her coffee, banana and other fruit trees, interspersed with leafy vanilla vines.

At 72, Namuddu remembers many times in the past when the harvest was not bountiful, and it felt like the garden was working against her. She remembers trying to scratch out a living from the soil using old methods — planting and praying for the best instead of carefully nurturing it — and when the coffee beans came in too small to sustain her livelihood. She’s reminded of when the hunger she felt in her belly was a daily reality, and she didn’t know how she’d feed her nine children.

But mostly when she stands in her garden, she remembers what it felt like to live without the hope she now feels growing inside her.

She said her life before was “just there,” an existence. Nowadays, she’s filled with purpose.

“When I reach the garden, I am proud,” Namuddu said. “[It’s] tiring, of course, but you have to be exhausted if you are passionate about what you’re doing.”

Five years ago, before Namuddu’s granddaughter was sponsored through Unbound’s Kampala program, the whole family was barely surviving by subsistence farming in one of the world’s poorest countries. Learning sustainable farming techniques taught by the Kampala program staff, they, along with many other families, have shifted their mindsets. Adopting new techniques that diversify not just the food they eat, but their income sources is helping them to banish food insecurity and establish the kind of sustainable livelihoods that could one day lead them from poverty.

The challenge for Uganda's farming families

The United Nations estimates that 281 million people in Africa do not have enough food to eat each day, while roughly three-quarters cannot afford nutritious food. Uganda is a landlocked country in east Africa where over 70% of the population lives in rural areas and is dependent on agriculture to earn a living.

But, despite agriculture being known as the backbone of Uganda’s economy, the Global Hunger Index classifies food insecurity in Uganda as “serious.” According to the World Bank, Uganda’s agriculture sector continues to be hindered from realizing its full potential for a number of reasons, including population growth, severe climate conditions, poor agricultural practices and lack of access to extension services, among others.

Severe climate conditions, in particular drought, have exacerbated issues since the country depends largely on rain-fed agriculture. Extreme events leading to floods, droughts and landslides have been increasing throughout the country for the last 30 years, according to the Climate Risk Country Profile: Uganda report conducted by the World Bank in 2021.

The report noted that rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns have shortened the country’s growing seasons, increasing soil erosions, crop disease and pest infestations, and reducing crop yields. Those most vulnerable to such events are the rural poor who already lack access to resources that help them cope and adapt in times of crisis.

International efforts to improve agriculture practices in Uganda have been extensive and multi-faceted with the Ugandan government implementing various initiatives to support farmers in adopting sustainable practices.

With subsistence farming, nearly all the crops grown are for the families’ own consumption, whereas more sustainable solutions seek to transition subsistence to market-oriented agriculture.

In Unbound’s Kampala program, shifting the mindsets of longtime farming families living below the poverty line away from traditional farming practices, along with identifying innovative solutions for accessing necessary resources, was an immediate challenge for the staff.

Using experience as a guide: Adapting to fit the needs of families

Teddy Naluwu has been Unbound’s national coordinator for Uganda for 13 of the almost 20 years she’s worked for the organization. A former Unbound sponsored child herself, born the youngest of 13 to a farming family, Naluwu has a strong work ethic and a love for serving others. Her background makes her intimately familiar with the challenges faced by Unbound’s families in Uganda, and personally invested in their journeys to rise above poverty.

“When I reflect on the families we work with and the change that I see, I realize that this was a journey that someone once walked with me and now I have the responsibility to also walk with others as they [better their lives],” Naluwu said.

Naluwu leads a team of 68 staff spread across eight Unbound program offices. They support over 10,800 sponsored children, youth and elders.

Most families in Unbound Kampala live in rural areas, and an estimated 90% depend on farming for their livelihoods. Families in Uganda grow both food crops and cash crops. Food crops include beans, tomatoes, maize (corn), peanuts, cassava, potatoes and bananas (locally known as matoke), while cash crops include bananas, coffee, vanilla and ginger.

Naluwu said changes in the country’s traditional rain patterns have left crops with either too much rain or not enough, destabilizing harvests and leading to food insecurity.

According to Naluwu, about 60% of families in Kampala entering the sponsorship program are food insecure, one of the major causes of malnutrition and associated with a range of negative health outcomes in low and middle-income countries. Because most of the Kampala program’s sponsored families live in rural areas, the staff has adapted programming to teach families how to use land as a resource to grow diversified varieties of food that offer more balanced meal options.

“We’re teaching new farming techniques to families with the long-term goal being that they can build sustainable agriculture-based enterprises that guarantee both self-sustenance and access to better livelihood opportunities, which eventually will result in walking the families out of poverty,” Naluwu explained.

Kampala program staff use a combination of theory workshops and on-the-farm trainings to expose families to new sustainable farming techniques. These techniques originate from the Enabling Rural Innovation (ERI) approach, which was originally developed by The International Center for Tropical Agriculture. The Kampala program began redesigning their programming to focus on the ERI approach more than five years ago, thanks to funding from a generous Unbound donor.

Originally, the staff worked with consultants and local government agricultural extension officers to train families on sustainable farming. These days, however, staff members have become so knowledgeable about the new techniques that they lead the trainings. Currently, the program has two social workers on staff who are also professional agriculturalists. 

Shifting mindsets by teaching climate-smart farming

When it comes to sustainable farming, Immaculate believes in the proverb “Two heads are better than one.” But it wasn’t long ago that she held to a vastly different approach.

Immaculate and her husband, Vincent, care for 12 children in their home, including their 15-year-old son Kiyimba. The family grows coffee and plantains for their livelihood, but they were barely getting by, and their living situation — a small mud hut without a proper latrine — was poor.

Immaculate had two major issues with her prior farming techniques: She didn’t understand proper spacing for her coffee trees at planting, and she would try to sell her coffee beans as soon as they were ready for harvesting. This resulted in very little of her trees growing to maturity (thus, a lower yield) and not having the best quality coffee to market.

When Immaculate’s son became sponsored and she began attending her Unbound small-group meetings, she learned that digging holes 2-feet-by-2-feet when planting her coffee seeds would offer better root development, more nutrient availability, water retention, and drainage and soil aeration — a more optimal environment for growing strong, healthy coffee. In addition, she learned that slowly drying her coffee beans in the sun after harvesting would result in a more nuanced and complex cup of coffee.

“Before, the situation that we were living in, I think even my brain had become frozen,” Immaculate said. “I could not even think about taking us to the next level. But what they taught us, that we can do farming in a way that makes bountiful harvests, that we ought to have a purpose and a goal, that reawakened my brain.”

Over the last five years, with increases in her agricultural productivity and savings strategies also learned from her small group, Immaculate has improved the family’s kitchen and built a new latrine.

Naluwu refers to Unbound Kampala’s sustainable farming techniques as “climate-smart strategies,” but they also teach families how to tap into the natural resources already available to them in rural areas. Techniques include soil and water conservation practices — such as mulching, which helps reduce water evaporation using composted manure collected from farm animals to act as fertilizer, and digging trenches to trap runoff water and reduce soil erosion. In addition, families are taught to practice intercropping, or growing diverse crops, at the same time in the same garden.

Sometimes new knowledge would contradict traditional knowledge, however, and adoption of new techniques would prove more challenging. For example, families believed having trees in their gardens meant they would have less space to grow more crops. In truth, the falling leaves of shade trees provide natural organic matter, which helps with soil texture and water retention around crops, while the tree itself acts as a windbreaker during extreme weather events and can even repel some pests.

According to Naluwu, with improved agricultural processes in place, perennial crops (such as coffee) have started to become more resilient in times of drought.

“Our training enlightens our families’ minds so that with or without the support of Unbound sponsorship, one day they will know how to invest in farming as a business with their own resources or with joint resources that they leverage from their groups,” Naluwu said.

Simply teaching Immaculate and other families the new techniques would only solve part of the challenge, however. Since poverty limits farming families’ access to external resources for their businesses, like capital and labor, helping them understand how to work together — to pool their resources, knowledge and time — is also a necessity if these changes are to be sustainable.

This is where Unbound’s small-group approach comes into play.

Once someone becomes sponsored, their entire family gains access to Unbound small groups, or parent support groups, where they learn livelihood development strategies and leadership building, among other things. The groups are guided by staff but are led entirely by group members, normally the mothers of sponsored children. The groups set goals — both individual and group goals — hold each other accountable to reach those goals, practice table banking and initiate community improvement projects.

Under the small-group model, the Kampala program promotes labor pooling as a methodology to teach members to work together for the common good in achievement of a goal. With “labor pooling,” members rotate working on each other’s farms, helping to dig holes and trenches or to harvest crops, saving everyone time and money.

For Immaculate, she believes her recent success at farming was largely due to her group’s ability to unite, pooling their labor to dig holes for coffee on each other’s farms during times when the sun was hot and the ground too hard for one person to accomplish the work on their own. This was when Immaculate began believing that “two heads are better than one.”

“When you join forces with others, [share] knowledge, take advice, tackle different problems, then you find you have done the right thing,” Immaculate said about farming as a business.

“Now when we say, ‘Let’s go and pay a visit to the garden to check on our coffee,’ everyone pays attention because our minds have been opened.”

Her group has become known in their community as the “Let’s Work Together” group.

Demonstration gardens put theory into practice and alleviate food insecurity

Namuddu rarely buys her own food these days, instead visiting her garden to gather what she needs for her meals. For someone who used to be more than familiar with the pangs of hunger, the three meals per day her garden can now provide has changed her life.

Namuddu’s cash crop consists mostly of coffee trees. Her garden is made up of rocky, hard soil, but with help from members of her Unbound small group, she was able to plant over 300 coffee trees on a 1-acre plot of land.

The 1-acre garden model was originally piloted by the Kampala program as part of their ERI approach and was found to be a viable strategy for challenging multidimensional poverty in Kampala. Besides supporting families with training, resource mobilization and group organization, the staff also provides new farming families entering the sponsorship program with agricultural inputs (resources that support crop production like seeds, fertilizers and pesticides) to help them get started in farming as a business using the new techniques.

Organized into groups of no more than 30 individuals, families receive training in both theory and practice for five consecutive days. Once training is complete, each family receives input support in the form of fertilizers and seedlings, and then staff members monitor their farming progress with the help of the small groups.

The practical sessions, or rather, the hands-on training, would not be possible without one other ERI approach that the Kampala program uses — demonstration gardens.

Demonstration gardens are where theory meets practice. Hands-on learning and observing of the new farming techniques takes place in these model gardens. Currently, there are 29 active demonstration gardens throughout the Kampala program, and each garden is owned by one of Unbound’s sponsored families.

Families whose gardens are chosen to be model gardens must meet some criteria — their gardens must be easily accessible to all members of their small group and must adhere to the new sustainable farming techniques. In these gardens, families observe not only how to nurture certain crops, but also how to practice intercropping to maximize both their production and profitability in one space.

“In the demonstration garden, all that must exist to show families that have not seen it before how these plants can grow together to maximize their profit while producing year-round access to enough food for them to eat,” Naluwu said.

There are several benefits to a family whose garden is chosen to be used for demonstration. If properly managed, the farmer can gain recognition and respect throughout the community, opening them up to a wider market and connection to prominent farmers they can call upon as a learning resource. In addition, some can earn extra money by acting as community trainers.

According to Naluwu, the longer a family is a part of the sponsorship program, the more likely they are to shift their mindsets. She estimates that after four years in the program, only 20% of families (down from 60% at the time of sponsorship) still experience food insecurity.

“Given time, there is a change in the way they think, how they do things, how they relate to others, how they plan, how they lead activities,” Naluwu said.

In 2023 alone, 1,147 households were able to build viable income-generating businesses using sustainable farming practices they learned through the Kampala program. Of those households, over 115 are currently earning above the global poverty line and could qualify to exit the sponsorship program.

Naluwu is proud that her staff can now talk confidently about farming as a business and that the larger organization supported the Kampala program in innovating programming to better suit the unique needs of families in Uganda.

But she believes the real strength of programming lies in what the families discover within themselves.

“Our results arise from how hardworking our families are,” Naluwu said. “So, we as a people need to believe in them, to see their potential and support them to see their own potential. We’ll continue to let them lead the development because, at the end of the day, they’ll excel.”

Learn more about the Unbound Kampala program’s commitment to eliminating poverty through farming as a business and see how their approach is largely being led by women farmers in Unbound's mothers groups. Read part two in the sustainable farming series, "Unity in a Garden."

Unbound’s regional reporter in Africa, Nickson Ateku, and Kampala program staff provided photos and information for this story .