The following article originally appeared in the October 31 edition of The New Vision, a Kampala, Uganda-based newspaper. A link to the paper is provided at the bottom of this page.


By Ronald Kalyango

Poor farmers find it difficult to organize themselves to make effective decisions and to obtain extension services.
Even where farmers groups exist, they generally function ineffectively.

One-stop-centre (OSC) approach a brainchild of Sasakawa Global 2000 seems to offer solutions to all these hiccups. It has yielded countless achievements in the districts of Tororo, Mukono, Iganga, Pallisa, Busia, Luweero and Mpigi.

Battson Kayaayo, the programme coordinator explains that OSC is a community-based organization of a village or group of villages managed by an elected committee. Its main tasks involve buying, storing and selling grains to villagers and outsiders.

He says the core services include technical support for production, agro-processing and marketing. Additional services include rural finance, literacy, healthcare and social activities.

Charles Sembatya, the programme specialist and enterprise development officer explains that OSC concept was introduced to empower rural communities to provide and maintain their own services on commercially viable basis.

He says its main objectives are to equip farmers with leadership and management skills and provide training needs.

"It also addresses agricultural development support delivery and marketing, facilitate relevant information dissemination and precision of the linkage to various services from relevant institutions and organizations," he explained.


Sembatya says the inception of one-stop-centre begins with a farming community that has successfully adopted some improved production technologies and is determined to move ahead.

Its establishment requires an officially registered association with dynamic leadership, leased land of about one acre, an agreement between the association and SG 2000 for specified period and a bank account and savings for the association preferably in a rural development bank.

In Luweero before the centre's establishment farmers engaged in upland rice cultivation used to trek over 30km to have their rice milled and a big number of them who could not meet the huge costs charged to have their rice milled, which caused them harvest losses. But when they acquired a rice-milling machine courtesy of Japanese International Corporation(JICA)(sic), more farmers have opened up land to embrace the crop cultivation.

Wasswa Kulazikulabe, who is in charge of the centre says, "Now that we have acquired the center, we expect to bring rice farmers together by registering them as marketing groups in order to address difficulties associated with rice marketing."

Though upland rice is increasingly becoming an important cash crop in the area, expansion of the planted area has been rather limited due to lack of advise on how to improve on its productivity.

To address this, in 2002, Sasakawa Global 2000 partnered with NAADS programme to empower farmers to start demanding advisory services under the programme.