Creating a Farmers’ Cooperative in Uganda

Farmers in Kyabigambire, Uganda utilize diverse agricultural management strategies. Yet these strategies are typically limited to the level of individual households, which places an upper limit on production and keeps farmers in a poverty trap. Access to community-level, cooperative management strategies could lift existing ceilings on crop production and pull households out of this poverty trap. However, legal and social barriers have historically inhibited farmers’ ability to access cooperative agricultural management strategies. The project proposed here would work to overcome these challenges by establishing an entity known as an Area Cooperative Enterprise (“ACE”). The ACE is a regional organization that fits within the Ugandan legal framework for social and economic development through cooperative governance. ACEs already exist in other regions of Uganda, and have been demonstrated to be successful through empirical evaluation. Formation of an ACE in Kyabigambire would increase farmers’ access to cooperative strategies for agricultural management. Benefits of ACE membership could include enhanced market access, access to credit for scaling-up production capacity, access to insurance, and access to processes which could add value to ACE members’ products, such as those for storing, cleaning, grading, sorting, processing, and packaging. The goal of the proposed project is to establish an ACE in Kyabigambire through the coordination of a series of workshops and meetings.