Correlating NAADS Agricultural Initiatives in the Tea Sector and the Industrialisation Potential for Community Transformation and Poverty Reduction in South-Western Uganda (2015–2025)

Abstract

Community transformation and poverty alleviation are central to every
country’s holistic development agenda as emphasized by the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs, 2000–2015) and the Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs, 2015–2030). Since 1986, Uganda has implemented a range of
political, economic, and social interventions aimed at fostering community
transformation and poverty reduction. However, these efforts have yielded
varying levels of success. Among these initiatives was the enactment of the
Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) in 1997 which led to the establishment
of the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) in 2001. NAADS
was designed to be a key instrument for promoting agricultural investment as
a means of transforming communities and alleviating poverty given
agriculture’s dominance in Uganda’s economy. Although NAADS has
recorded considerable achievements in enhancing agricultural production, it
has underperformed in promoting agro-processing, an omission that has limited
its overall impact (Fiala and Apell, 2017). This study investigated the extent to
which opportunities arising from the increased distribution of tea seedlings and
the subsequent expansion of tea farming have been leveraged to establish
value-addition enterprises, such as green leaf and processed black tea industrial
facilities in the Greater Bushenyi districts, one of the primary beneficiaries of
NAADS. Employing a descriptive research design and a mixed-methods
approach, data were collected from key stakeholders in the agriculture sector
at both district and national levels. The findings indicate that the government’s
goal of community transformation and poverty alleviation has been hampered
by the failure to integrate agro-industrialization into the design and
implementation of NAADS. The study concludes that it is only through
coordinated, well-financed, and strategically implemented efforts that Uganda
can realize the full transformative potential of its tea sector and agriculture
more broadly