From the Field
Monday, March 11, 2024
Regenerative Agriculture in Uganda
A regenerative agriculture project with Partnerships for Forests helped accelerate the transition of the coffee value chain towards regenerative agricultural practices. The project promotes agro-forestry, low-carbon farming methods and building living income with smallholder farmers in our supply chain.
By improving farmers’ livelihoods through revenue diversification activities and community empowerment, as well as training farmers in agroforestry techniques, the project helped increase farmer livelihoods and protect land.
The project had three main components:
- Training farmers on business skills, agroforestry and gender activities
- Setting up agroforestry and landscape governance models (models to support farmers on their farming practices such as avoiding deforestation and preventing encroachment on natural resources)
- Sustainability interventions for farmers (agroforestry nurseries, tree planting, demo setups, soil analysis, organic fertilizer application, and designing a credit scoring system for farmer financing, assessing living income, preventing deforestation, reducing carbon emissions, and improving gender equity)
In two years, we planted over 44,000 trees, including banana seedlings and napier grass, trained over 2,500 unique farmers, and established carbon footprinting and living income baselines for the Rubirizi and Bushenyi districts. We also established community-based relationships where different district stakeholders were involved in the formation of the district landscape governance committees in respective districts.
Currently, Sucafina in Uganda team members are managing 2 nurseries that provide seedlings to farmers and mobilizing farmers to deliver coffee cherries to Sucafina washing stations. They’re also working on a credit system with LendXS so far, 50 farmers have been able to access credit and 40 more farmers will receive credit on fair terms in the next phase of the pilot lending year.
Based on their involvement with the local community, UGACOF (Sucafina in Uganda) has recommended solutions to ongoing problems and will be involved in implementing programs to increase yields, improve incomes and strengthen resilience to climate change. Roasters can get involved in these projects and other community support endeavors through IMPACT.
Get Involved
Our IMPACT program enables roasters to get involved in their direct supply chain. Roasters can contribute to specific programs that support the coffee-producing community that grows their coffee. Contact your trader to learn more about this regenerative agriculture project and how you can get involved in increasing living income and regenerative agriculture in your supply chain