Policies For Improved Land Management in Uganda: Second National Workshop

Hon. Dr. Kisamba Mugerwa, The Minister of Agriculture, Animal Industries and Fisheries, Honorable Ministers and Members of Parliament, The Director General, NARO, the visiting delegation from IFPRI and other International Institutions, other Participants, Ladies and Gentlemen: It is my pleasure to welcome you all to the second national workshop on Policies for Improved Land Management in Uganda. We at Makerere University, and the faculty of agriculture in particular, are proud to co-sponsor this workshop, organized to discuss the findings of the 3 year project on Policies for Improved Land Management, which is about to be concluded. I wish to congratulate our partners (IFPRI, NARO, APSEC and ZEF) for this significant achievement. Three years ago, we gathered here to plan policy research aimed at helping policy makers identify and assess policy, institutional and technology strategies for improving land management and reducing poverty without jeopardizing the natural resource base. To date, all the field activities that the project planned to undertake have been completed including the characterization survey, community survey, market surveys, and household and plot surveys. These activities have generated a lot of data, which must be analyzed and made available to all stakeholders, particularly the policy makers to help in formulating policies that are supportive of agricultural modernization, which is the sure way of reducing poverty in this country. Today, we are gathered here to receive some of the outputs of this research effort. I wish to congratulate the research team on a job well done, and to wish them good luck as they continue to process and analyze the rest of the data to produce usable results. In addition to the completed field activities, the project has made significant progress in capacity training by involving local collaborators in research design, implementation and analysis; and training Ugandan scholars at Ph.D. level at the Center for Development Research, University of Bonn (ZEF). Increased awareness of the project and its objectives has been achieved among policy makers through the project Advisory Committee, to which I am the chairman. This is a very significant achievement. The challenge is now upon all of us to use the findings of this carefully done research as a tool to contribute to national development by tackling the problems of land degradation, low agricultural productivity and poverty. Thank you very much.