In 1986 Uganda was bankrupt – a byword for corruption and economic mismanagement. Six years of civil war in this former British colony in East Africa had followed the ousting of Idi Amin and its social and state institutions were near collapse.

But today Uganda’s economy is widely seen as a success story and over the last ten years the number of Ugandans living in absolute poverty has been cut by half – although the North – ravaged by rebel attacks – has been declared a disaster zone. How has Uganda achieved this remarkable turnaround?

Margret with vanilla vine.

In the 1980s, Margret Nampala was farming coffee and barely surviving on under $1 a day. “We couldn’t even look after our grown up children because our income from coffee was so little,” she says. By 2003, she and her family were earning more than 10 thousand dollars a year, mainly from farming a new crop, vanilla. The question for Margaret and for many Ugandans is whether this success is sustainable.

Uganda’s economic growth has averaged 6 per cent over the last 16 years. And four million Ugandans have moved out of absolute poverty. But Dr Sam Okuonzi says that the new wealth hasn’t been well distributed. “My contention is that what we are doing with this wealth has not been good enough to lift people out of poverty and that therefore the mass of the population has remained entrenched in the same poverty that we witnessed 15, 20 years ago. It hasn’t changed significantly.”

But there is no doubt that for a lot of small farmers, vanilla has brought real prosperity. Vanilla is a crop suited to small farmers. It’s difficult labour-intensive work – the thousands of vanilla flowers have to be individually pollinated by hand. And Uganda is one of only a limited number of countries which have the right ecological conditions to grow vanilla.

In 1990 just 1500 kilos of vanilla was produced in the Uganda. By 2003 more than 30 thousand kilos were produced – bringing Uganda six million dollars in export revenues. Food exporter Aga Sekalala explains how it was done: “What we needed to do was mobilise the farmers and assure them of a market… once the farmers were organised , we mobilised, we trained them, once they got money – cash – and it was big money – then the crop just boomed.”

The World Bank is very keen on the project. World Bank Managing Director Shengman Zhang: “You get the impression that, first they really like what they’re doing, they are not being told what to do but they seem to be committed to the crop because they bring them real benefits… In simple terms the more they put in, the more they get and I think for the common man that’s probably the best description you can find in terms of ownership.”

Dr Sam Okuonzi

But even now, vanilla only accounts for 2 per cent of Uganda’s agriculture, and is only grown in one part of the country. And Dr Sam Okuonzi complains: “The World Bank always comes here, year in year after, talking about vanilla, and I've heard this for the last fifteen years, but it really hasn't changed the situation in the country very much because the focus is imply on individuals.”

But there are other measures of real progress in Uganda. Access to clean water, health and especially education has improved. In 1994 less than a third of children went to primary school – today it's 97% of those eligible. And Uganda was one of the first countries in Africa to begin to reverse the AIDS/HIV prevalence rate – estimated to have fallen from 15% in 1993 to just 7% in 2002.

Almost all Ugandan children now go to school.

The Ugandan government argues that its education policies will help it meet its poverty reduction programme goals. Chris Kassami, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Finance, says: “If the primary education emphasis continues and it continues to be successful as it is now so that we are able to reduce illiteracy and we are to able to increase the people that complete education then that on its own will drive down population growth because people delay decisions of getting children they also after those they have better.”

But Hellen Wangusa from the African Women’s Economic Policy Network (AWEPON) says that the emphasis has been on enrolment, with retention and quality being ignored. “What about infrastructure? What about teacher-pupil ratios? There was a study that was done by Uganda National Examinations Board, and they clearly say 96% of children in the rural schools could neither read nor write, after six years of universal primary education.”

One-third of Ugandans still live on less than a dollar a day.

ganda still has debt of nearly $4 billion, and nearly half the government’s income comes from foreign aid – not a sustainable situation. Dr Sam Okuonzi says: “90% of this population requires a helping hand, and that helping hand is not going to come about through the private sector or through the free market. It's going to come through the intervention of government, and the government is not doing that now.”

But Margret’s story shows how there can be a way out of poverty. She knows she can’t rely on vanilla - its price is never guaranteed, so she’s diversifying into other crops. And she’s planning for the future. “We have prepared for our future, though you can never know what God has planned for you. And another thing with vanilla is that we intercrop it with bananas, oranges and avocadoes. In a year we can harvest one hundred and fifty sacks of avocado. We harvest about three trucks of oranges which we take to Kampala for sale. We have taken 3 lorries to Kampala so we plant those things and we have yet found a new plant – cocoa... If the prices of vanilla remain like this for the next two years we shall be able to invest in other things. We will buy a lorry to help us in the bad periods when vanilla is not there.”

TRANSCRIPT Read the full transcript of Aiming High