Household Food Security in Uganda: Reflections on the Prosperity-For-All Programme

Abstract

Abstract: The objective of the Prosperity-For-All (PFA) programme is to transform rural and peri-urban poor households in order for them to achieve food security and to create wealth. While the government of Uganda aspires to promote household food security through the PFA model, several bottlenecks around the mode of implementation, selection of beneficiaries and role of intermediary agencies, remain unattended. One way to address this problem is to establish its contribution in terms of availability of food to household food security – as well as the contribution of access to food to household food security in mid-western Uganda from the beneficiaries’perspective. The phenomenological design was thus adopted to allow participants to describe their experiences of PFA vis-a-vis the household food security situation. Using judgmental sampling, 50 participants from four counties of mid-western Uganda were selected. It was established that, in the study area, while several households produced sufficient food, only 45% of the households visited reported availability of food throughout the year due to among other factors post-harvest losses in storage. Access to constant and adequate foodstuffs by households is hampered by low income and the high cost of transport to local food markets due to poor roads. The results suggest that the PFA programme has the potential to increase the availability of and access to household foodstuffs, if the pillars of production, value addition, marketing and microfinance, are prioritised in unison.