A rural community initiative, backed by the our program is empowering smallholder farmers. In rural Uganda, more than 60 percent of rural families are employed in agriculture and yet their potential as farmers and entrepreneurs is often limited due to gender inequalities, reduced access to farming inputs such as seeds and fertilizers and little or no access to finance. The potential economic gains from reducing gaps in agriculture can translate into significant poverty reduction.
Uganda rural households have high levels of food insecurity. This high level of food insecurity results from the fact that rural access to liability support is limited and that they have fewer animals and produce fewer types of crops, or no crops at all. As such, they remain highly dependent upon humanitarian assistance to meet their basic needs and are often forced to adopt negative coping strategies to deal with food shortages.
In order to address some of these needs, Cico Uganda has developed and is implementing an innovative approach to ensure rural communities have a variety of foods and nutrient alternatives at their disposal, both boosting their household incomes and nutrition levels at the same time. This has been achieved through the introduction of kitchen gardens, an approach that allows rural communities to maximize the small pieces of land provided to them to grow high-value and nutrient-dense vegetables.
We are rolling this out to all the rural communities, this is because success has been immense here. We just want the communities to have as many alternatives and supplements to the food we give them as possible, to be able to sustain themselves and their children. Growing such vegetables to provide extra nutrients and an alternative diet might be the answer to have this statistic change among rural children in Uganda.
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