Heifer CD: We support farmers to attain a sustainable living income 

HPI Uganda has been operating in Uganda since 1982. What impact have you created in ending food insecurity and promoting agriculture both on commercial and subsistence farms?

Heifer International was founded in 1944 at the climax of the Second World War, in the United States of America. We currently work in 25 countries across the world and have a footprint in almost every continent including Africa, Asia, Europe and US. For last 42 years in Uganda, HPI has supported more than one million families and close to five million farmers indirectly to close their living income gap across 52 districts. 

Our programmes have been greatly impactful in the societies where we operate because our mission is very clear, to end hunger and poverty while caring for the earth. HPI Uganda focuses on value chain development, women and girls’ economic empowerment while integrating access to innovative, ethical and equitable technology and finance. Our priority and anchor value chains are dairy and beef, poultry, swine, oilseeds and horticulture. 
We support and enable smallholder farmers, particularly women and youth to identify and exploit agribusiness opportunities, to enhance their competitiveness and employability for sustainable living incomes. 
In Uganda we have been in all the regions. We have supported more than one million smallholder farmers directly. We organise the farmers into groups, through which we support them to increase production and productivity, access markets, and work in an enabling environment.

How do you do that?
We help farmers cooperatives through which we offer support in a uniform manner. We later connect them to markets by matching them with players in the industry. 
For example, dairy farmers are connected to companies that deal in milk processing for assured market for their dairy products.
In Uganda, our target for the next seven years, is to reach out to 400,000 smallholder farmers, to make them competitive in the sector, resilient and support them to raise their income, to close their living income gap. Our target value chains include dairy and beef, poultry, horticulture, oil seeds and swine which value chains the government has as well prioritised in its agro-industrialisation agenda. 

We also support these farmers to access reliable water, technology and finance which is one of their major challenges yet key enablers. 
Through the cooperatives, we carry out capacity building in business management, provide access to markets and financial support to kick-start them into self-sustenance. For example, we connected farmers in Western Uganda to Jessa milk who buy milk from these farmers. Jessa bought milk coolers for these cooperatives to improve the milk collection exercise.

How are you helping these farmers to tackle climate change?
Climate change is among the major issues affecting smallholder farmers and it has complicated the dynamics of food insecurity. 
One of our focus areas has been to promote climate-smart agriculture which is eco-friendly, by ensuring that the farmers get the right breeds, seedlings which are both drought and flood resistant and this has helped in improving their productivity capacity. 

We teach farmers to adopt climate change agriculture practices. One of our climate-smart solution Heifer has put in place is to enable farmers’ access to high yielding and resilient pasture seeds, as well as carrying out capacity building on pasture conservation. 
Heifer promotes use of solar power to preserve milk, a move which translates into high volumes and quality of milk attained, while reducing the cost of energy and therefore better revenues for the producer organizations and dairy farmers. 

We are setting up six solar-powered rural milk chilling solutions at six dairy cooperatives in Nakaseke, Nakasongola, Kiboga and Sembabule districts..
In circumstances where the situations are beyond the farmers control such as floods, how do you ensure that they do not incur losses?
We connect farmers to index insurance. We have entered a partnership with PULA an insurance broker which is already working with the Agro-Insurance Consortium. In this partnership, the government pays 80 percent while the farmers pay 20 percent. 
At the inception of this partnership Heifer paid the 20 percent for the farmers until they appreciated the importance of insurance. Today, they pay the dues happily for they have seen the benefits.

Do you have special programmes for youths?
Youths and women economic empowerment is among our priority areas because we realised that they are the ones providing the largest labour force in the sector. We work to address bottlenecks hindering women and youth farmers, while creating jobs and unlocking potential of young entrepreneurs to drive innovation in agri-business to achieve a living-income. Our programs are designed in line with supporting young people. 
We currently have a program in partnership with MasterCard Foundation and we have so far supported 21,000 young farmers and created meaningful jobs through on and off farmer enterprises.
 
Our 2030 goal is to support 400,000 Ugandan smallholder farmers with 70 percent youth and women.
We also have an annual Agribusiness Innovative challenge called Agriculture, Youth and Technology (AyuTe) Africa challenge where we identify and award exceptional talented innovative youths in the agriculture sector. 
In 2022, the AYuTe Africa challenge- Uganda inaugural prize attracted applications from over 254 young innovators. 

The competition benefitted young people who had innovations ranging from solar powered walking-tractor proto-types to solar powered irrigation prototypes made from recycled waste pieces.