Impact of Uganda’s National Agricultural Advisory Services Program
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Date
2011
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
International Food Policy Research Institute
Abstract
The importance of agricultural extension in agricultural and rural development is widely known, so it is not surprising that agricultural extension has attracted substantial investment of public resources since
t he 1950s, when national agricultural advisory services began t o be formally
established by government s, and has strongly returned to the international
development agenda (World Bank 2007a). Due to competing uses of public
resources for promoting overall growth and equitable distribution, however,
careful reflection of the impacts of and returns to public spending in agricultural advisory services is necessary. This is the aim of this study, which
focuses on t he NAADS program in Uganda that has been implemented since
2001. The NAADS program, which is a key strategy for implementing t he government ’ s poverty reduction and national development plan, was conceived
as a move away from t he t op-down approach that is publicly funded, with
services provided by public agents, to a demand-driven approach that is still
largely publicly funded but wit h services provided by the private sector.
The program targets the development and use of farmer institutions and in
the process seeks to empower them t o procure enterprise-based advisory
services, manage linkages wit h marketing partners, and conduct monitoring
and evaluation of the advisory services they receive from the private sector (Uganda, NAADS Secretariat 2001). By end of the 2006–07 financial year,
the period of the analysis in this study, about UGX 110 billion (in 2000 UGX)
had been spent on the program, which had been extended t o 545 sub counties (about 83.1 percent of the total sub counties in Uganda at the time)
from the initial 24 sub counties in six district s where it had been launched.
Furthermore, about 1,622 contracts with private-sector service providers
had been signed, more than 40 enterprises had been promoted, and about
40,000 farmer groups and 716,000 farmers (representing about 20 percent
of the national farming households) had received services from the program
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Citation
Benin, S., Nkonya, E., Okecho, G., Randriamamonjy, J., Kato, E., Lubadde, G., ... & Byekwaso, F. (2011). Impact of Uganda's National Agricultural Advisory Services Program (Vol. 175). Intl Food Policy Res Inst.