Unity in a Garden

“Unity in a Garden” is the second of a two-part series on sustainable farming in Unbound’s Kampala program in Uganda.

In the rural Rakai District of Kampala, Uganda, a group of mothers labor under the sun in a member’s garden. They use sticks like measuring tapes to estimate distance and depth as they dig holes 2-feet-by-2-feet to plant coffee seeds.

In the Luganda language, the group is known as Tusitukirewamu Development Group, or "Together We Stand." Together We Stand consists of 32 individuals, mostly mothers, from the same community. Many are single parents, and all are subsistence farmers. In this country in sub-Saharan East Africa, where agriculture is the main livelihood, food insecurity exacerbated by climate change has made survival a daily challenge for farming families living in poverty.

In the past, digging hundreds of holes in hard-packed soil in the heat would have taken each group member three days to accomplish on their own. But now, they no longer shoulder the burden alone.

They have learned the power of a unified group with a common vision and common goals, working as one. Today, they can easily dig 200 holes in a day by working together on one farm before moving on to the next member’s farm to help with the planting.

With guidance from Unbound’s Kampala program staff, subsistence farming families like those in Together We Stand have been learning climate-smart sustainable farming techniques as part of the program’s Enabling Rural Innovation (ERI) approach. But that’s not all they’re learning.

They’re also becoming empowered to drive change by uniting under shared goals — organizing, planning and pooling their labor, resources and savings, and marketing to maximize their earnings — and being led mostly by female farmers.

The approach is challenging multi-dimensional poverty and resulting in families abandoning traditional survival mindsets for more sustainable, equitable solutions that lead to thriving farming businesses.

Closing the gender gap for women farmers could reduce poverty

The world faces a global hunger crisis.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 733 million people faced hunger in 2023 (152 million more than in 2019), which is equivalent to one in 11 people worldwide.

If current trends continue, the world will fall significantly short of achieving goal two of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations nine years ago. The goal seeks to end global hunger in all its forms by 2030. It’s estimated now that 582 million people will be chronically undernourished in 2030, half of them in Africa.

Major drivers in worsening food insecurity and malnutrition in Africa include conflict, climate change, economic downturns, persistent inequality and lack of access to affordable nutritional foods, among others. According to the World Bank, investments in Africa’s agriculture will not only improve productivity and the continent’s ability to feed a growing population but will also lift families out of poverty.

However, one barrier to agricultural development and growth globally is the wide and pervasive gender gap.

Women often have less access to land, education, training, extension services, markets and quality inputs (seeds and fertilizers), and typically have less household decision-making power. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that if women farmers worldwide had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20-30%, raising total agricultural outputs by 2.5-4%.

According to FAO, tackling gender inequalities common in agrifood systems and empowering women could reduce the number of food-insecure people by 45 million.

In African agriculture, women comprise nearly half of the labor force, but overall, produce less per acre than men. In Uganda, where most of the population lives in rural areas, women contribute 56% of crop labor.

International efforts to improve the gender gap in agriculture in Uganda have been multifaceted, with development agencies experimenting with different delivery approaches for extension services models, investing in adult education for women, and expanding women’s access to, and improved use of, agricultural fertilizers, pesticides and seeds.

Unbound has long observed that empowered women and mothers in our programs are oftentimes the ones leading their families from poverty. When women gain more decision-making power and have more control over their incomes, they use their resources wisely to make decisions that benefit the whole family, allocating more income to food, health, education and their children’s nutrition.

In Kampala, Unbound’s mothers group model has been essential in uniting farming families to work together to build their paths out of poverty.

Empowering women farmers and mothers in Uganda by enabling rural innovation

At 31 years old, Nakayenga had always felt that she had it within herself to lead others, but she didn’t allow herself to dream.

When she was elected chair of her Unbound Kampala mothers group, Together We Stand, she latched onto the leadership opportunity. She internalized any group trainings offered by the staff, applying the climate-smart farming techniques to her own garden and being a source of encouragement to other group members in their trainings and in the completion of their goals.

For the year that they’ve been active, Together We Stand has been working on improving sanitation and hygiene in their homes and practicing intercropping (growing both cash and food crops at the same time, in the same garden) using the new sustainable farming techniques.

“I am seeing … that [family] has [developed] a big sweet potato farm, and that one has grown cassava, and that family has maize,” Nakayenga said about the group’s successes thus far. “We have hope.”

On average, each adult member of Together We Stand was only able to complete five years of education because of poverty. But the improvements Nakayenga has seen in her livelihood have already allowed her to begin dreaming of how her own children will have the opportunity to receive full educations, and maybe even attend college. She also dreams for those in her community — a community she now feels empowered to work to improve.

“The dream I have on my heart is to see everyone being developed so that when you visit their homes, you see that they have gotten to a very good place,” she said.

Mothers groups (self-help and parent support groups) are the primary way that families participate in Unbound, meeting monthly to encourage learning and growth in a spirit of collaboration. Mothers groups awaken self-discovery and leadership formation while promoting entrepreneurship and savings strategies and, eventually, community development initiatives. The Unbound Mothers Group model has been in existence for more than 20 years, and over 12,000 mothers groups are active worldwide.

In Unbound’s Kampala program, there are 509 active mothers and parent support groups. Program staff began introducing the ERI approach to mothers groups more than five years ago, and 489 groups are now engaged in farming as a business. Using the ERI approach, staff have motivated a change in traditional farming mindsets by using demonstration gardens to teach climate-smart farming techniques.

But the ERI approach encompasses more than learning sustainable farming.

The Enabling Rural Innovation approach was originally developed by The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) to help rural communities in Eastern and Southern Africa. A solution-focused approach, ERI “stimulates farmers organized in groups to rediscover their existing resources and enables them to find innovative solutions and make informed decisions on marketing, production and consumption.”

According to CIAT, while traditional rural innovation methods have often treated farmers as passive beneficiaries, the ERI approach recognizes them as proactive or potential agro-entrepreneurs who, with proper training and resource access, can take charge of their own futures.

ERI encourages farmers to “produce what they can market rather than market what they produce.”

Unbound’s national coordinator in Uganda, Teddy Naluwu, said staff support families in identifying their challenges, resources and opportunities at the household, group and community levels, and in developing goals to overcome their challenges.

“ERI broadly focuses on creating an environment where rural communities can innovate, diversify and thrive across multiple sectors, not just agriculture,” Naluwu said. “The aim is to empower communities with skills, financial resources, technology and market access to enhance overall socioeconomic well-being.”

Learn about the climate-smart farming techniques families have learned through demonstration gardens. Read Part 1 of the sustainable farming series, “Hope in a Garden.”

Women’s empowerment is a central concern at all stages of the ERI approach, according to CIAT. A hallmark of the ERI approach is using proactive strategies and gender-sensitive facilitation to build the capacity of women to identify and evaluate a diverse range of market opportunities, and to experiment with a range of technologies for crop and soil fertility management.

In Unbound Kampala’s mothers groups, members elect leaders and committees and leverage resources they already have access to, like labor pooling and practicing saving and loaning. As a group, they’re encouraged to establish or join existing cooperatives as a safety net for access to savings and credit, and they learn how to partner with their communities, local governments and other service providers to share knowledge and resources.

When group members work together to meet individual goals, such as pooling their labor on each other’s farms, individual goals become group goals.

“The committees are instrumental in ensuring the correct application of the farming techniques and, because they’re working together, pooling their labor, you realize that it’s a group effort that is enabling each person to achieve their goals,” Naluwu said.

Program staff encourage families to grow food crops, but also cash crops that already have an established economic demand such as coffee and bananas. While Unbound’s cash transfer model allows families direct access to their sponsorship benefits, the greatest challenge they still face with farming as a business is that it is both labor and capital intensive. While labor pooling eliminates the need for hiring workers, mothers groups also practice saving and loan strategies and allow members to borrow without presenting collateral.

Another focus of Unbound Kampala’s ERI approach encourages collective marketing through cooperatives. Because Uganda is predominantly an agricultural economy, Naluwu said cooperatives are key to successful farming as a business.

“Cooperatives are a bigger platform that enhance the members’ bargaining power,” Naluwu said. “It eliminates the middleman, allowing members to sell their produce at higher prices.”

Unbound Kampala encourages cooperatives as a sustainability mechanism. In cooperatives, members can buy and sell as a group, in bulk, and benefit from government programs, which eventually helps them to build a stronger support network that extends beyond their group.

In the last year, Unbound Kampala mothers groups have formed over 12 multi-purpose or produce-specific cooperatives that have enabled members to benefit from economies of scale.

Mothers groups togetherness inspires community action and mindset change

Nakayenga, Namuddu and Immaculate are women farmers in Kampala who each chair their separate Unbound mothers groups.

They and their families have benefitted from the Kampala program’s efforts through ERI. All three have gained confidence in their abilities and potential as leaders. They have banished food insecurity in their homes, and their gardens are now used as models, or demonstration gardens, to train new group members how to practice sustainable farming.

Kampala program social worker Caroline Tracey Nassolo said the thing she loves to see come to life in mothers groups is how the mothers are empowered with positivity to work together to achieve the goals they once could not achieve alone.

“We want to see them set the standard, to work on the structure of their farming, to increase their incomes, better educate their children and overall support their families,” she said.

The mothers groups encourage togetherness amongst the mothers but also within the community, Nassolo pointed out. One of the things mothers are most proud of is the ripple effect of their collaboration to their wider communities.

Group cooperatives are open to community members who are not a part of Unbound, and many in the community join in on the sustainable farming trainings that take place in demonstration gardens.

Immaculate said people in her community were inspired to see who could grow their coffee better than families in Unbound’s programs.

“So many have copied our coffee [planting techniques],” Immaculate said. But many have also learned from the mothers groups how to adopt better hygiene habits in their homes. Copying the group’s methods, they’ve built more sanitary latrines and places to dispose of waste.

Donors help program staff overcome challenging situations with innovative, personalized solutions

To combat the unique agricultural and livelihood challenges faced by their country and families served by Unbound, Kampala staff began redesigning their programming more than five years ago to focus on applying the ERI approach, a process that would have been more challenging if not for funding from one generous, longtime Unbound sponsor and donor.

The late Albert Hacker Jr. sponsored 117 individuals and donated more than $3.8 million to Unbound over the course of more than 22 years. Hacker had a particular interest in families in Unbound’s programs in Africa — over half of those he sponsored were from Unbound’s Kampala program. Between 2016 and 2022, he donated more than $630,000 to the Kampala program’s “community needs fund.”

“Mr. Hacker’s financial resources gave us the courage and confidence to pilot the ‘farming as a business’ model,” Naluwu said. “He enabled us to develop and broadly adopt a new strategy for ending poverty among sponsored rural farming households.”

Right away, Hacker’s contributions enabled Kampala program staff to support over 500 households with agricultural inputs (fertilizers and seedlings) to establish viable, at-scale coffee and banana intercropping gardens, and to pilot the 1-acre garden model. Over the years, his support helped 1,574 households in the Kampala program to establish viable, income-generating farming businesses.

Following his death at the age of 95 in 2022, Hacker bequeathed much of his residuary estate to Unbound through planned giving, an amount totaling over $2.7 million. At the time, it was the largest unrestricted bequest made to the organization in its more than 40-year history. The gift also ensured sponsorship benefits, including funding for higher education and immediate family needs, to Hacker’s three remaining sponsored youths — all living in Africa — until each reaches the age of 25.

Today, more than 9,000 families in Kampala’s programs are using the climate-smart farming techniques to grow coffee, bananas and vanilla and have the potential to earn $2,000 USD or more each year — providing sustainable livelihoods that will one day lift them out of poverty.

According to Naluwu, the success of the “farming as a business” model has led the Kampala program staff to pilot a 10-year fixed-term sponsorship program, which, they have learned, is the adequate time frame for a household to transform, thrive and no longer need the support of Unbound to sustain their livelihoods.

In Unbound’s Kampala program, compassion, innovation and hope have begun to build a legacy. The term “legacy” is mostly used to refer to the long-lasting impact of events or actions that took place in the past.

But “legacy” can also be an ideal. For over 22 years, one sponsor’s compassion and recognition of human dignity led him to — in life and in death — walk alongside those most in need. Bolstered by his support, Unbound staff in Kampala had a dream more than five years ago to design a program for farming families that so deeply encompassed all that they are that it might have been designed entirely by farming families.

And the impact of those ideals lived today by farming families across Kampala, with the mothers groups leading the way, is a legacy in which sustainable farming ensures lasting income and food security, and hope continues to grow.

Learn more about the Unbound Kampala program’s commitment to eliminating poverty through farming as a business and the sustainable farming techniques they’ve embraced in Part 1 of our sustainable farming series, “Hope in a Garden.”

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