Agribusiness Growth in Kyenjojo, Uganda

A quiet revolution is sweeping across Africa as young people are desiring to take control of their destinies and improve their lives in spite of their circumstances.  A group of young people are changing the African narrative and one such young person is Eric Kaduru who started an organization to empower young people to engage in agribusiness by providing loan and technical assistance to farmer of passion fruit.

In some of the rural areas in Uganda young girls still do not finish high school which give them limited choices but Kaduru’s KadAfrica has a program that allocates program participate a small track of land to grow passion fruit and sell the produce on the open agribusiness  market. Kaduru believes that by empowering young women farmers to create sources of income gives them better choices than early marriage or felonious behavior just to survive.

The young women are given curriculum based training on financial literacy, empowerment and entrepreneurship in addition to the plot of land. They generally generate about 100-150kg of yield on a monthly basis which translate to $20- $40 monthly before the program they earned on average $3 a month.

The program encourages women to diversify their business portfolio and since they have savings many have branched out to start other businesses as well that include nursery schools and shoe and clothing stores. The success of the program participants has led many women in Kyenjojo Uganda to enroll in the program which currently has a waiting list of 1200 women.

KADAFRICA

Uses an integrative approach that combines hands-on and curriculum based learning and recognizes the relationship between economic security and poor choices or risky behaviors among young women in rural Western Uganda. Girls aged 14-20 are provided with the resources—access to land, quality grafted seedling, and inputs—as well as skills necessary to begin their own passion fruit farms. This vertically growing vine is ideal as it affords smallholder farmers space to grow ground dwelling crops for consumption while generating income through passion fruit. More information can be found at http://www.kadafrica.org/