COMMENTATOR (COMM:
Previously on Life...:

Hilde Johnson:
‘The rich countries have to improve significantly and so do the poor countries. There’s no way we can achieve this without both doing our job...’

Meera Shenoy:
‘The aim of the project is to improve the quality of life of the poor people. And I think alleviation is a strong term.’

Scott Guggenheim:
‘The first step is to get decision making down to the bottom and the second step is to maximise people’s involvement in these things’

COMM:
In 1986 Uganda was bankrupt... an impoverished country – 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. This edition of Life looks at how Uganda has achieved this remarkable turnaround. And asks whether it could now be on course to meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people living on less than a dollar a day by 2015.

Uganda today is a very different country to the one broken by its civil war in the 1980s, but it’s not yet at peace. The country’s parliament has declared the North – ravaged by rebel attacks - a disaster zone.

But elsewhere in recent years – in development terms – there’s been a sea change in Uganda’s economy.

The country has seen sustained economic growth – averaging 6 per cent over the last sixteen years. And four million Ugandans have moved out of absolute poverty – surviving on less than a dollar a day...

In a country where 80 per cent of the labour force work on the land – the change in fortunes for farmers like Margret Nampala has been spectacular.

In the 1980s she too was earning less than a dollar a day.

MARGRET NAMPALA, Farmer:
Life was very bad and if you’d seen the house we were living in that is when you would have know. We couldn’t even look after our grown up children because our income from coffee was so little. We were very poor – with my husband, we were only farmers, with no other job.

COMM:
By 2003, she and her family were earning more than 10 thousand dollars a year. The question for Margret and for many Ugandans is whether this success is sustainable. Ugandans are divided in their response.

GERALD SSENDAULA, Minister of Finance, Uganda:
We had all these competing problems of insecurity, and people lost confidence so when now they realise that policies on the economy were that clear and at the same time there was peace, then that enhanced the position for people to really move away and make progress that you see today.

DR. SAM OKUONZI, National Council for Children, Uganda:
The economy must grow, people must innovate, produce wealth. My contention is that it’s not a guarantee for removing mass poverty… But what you do with this wealth determines the quality of life of people. And 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.

COMM:
Within a year of President Museveni taking power in 1986 his military government started negotiating with International Donors for loans to try and get Uganda back on its feet. These loans were conditional – on Uganda getting a firm grip on its economy, monetary controls, bringing in trade reforms – and opening up its markets. Import bans were removed, tariffs cut and foreign exchange liberalized.

Internally government bureaucracy was reformed, and the centralized marketing boards which controlled the prices paid to farmers were abolished. The new environment encouraged new opportunities – for entrepreneurs like Aga Sekalala...

AGA SEKALALA, Food exporter:
I wanted some something to export and I wanted high value crop…and there was an enabling environment. I think the government allowed us to travel and other things. Before that it was even impossible to travel, but the enabling environment was there.

COMM:
Every day Margret Nampala heads off to her four-acre plantation that she farms with her husband Lamaka. Along the way they pick up their farm workers. Like many farmers in Uganda they had been dependent on coffee – the country’s major export earner.

But between 1987 and 1993 coffee prices dropped by half on the world markets and coffee crop disease - slashed their income still further. So encouraged by liberalization as well as by food exporters like Aga Sekalala, Margaret and her husband diversified into other cash crops – like vanilla - to try to make a living...

MARGRET NAMPALA:
When the coffee plantation started drying, so we continued to grow more vanilla in a large sale. In 1990 we started to grow vanilla in a large scale.

ERASMUS MAYANJA (Margret's son):
We put vanilla and we look at vanilla as only the source of income, OK. So we diverted everything to vanilla, and we achieved a lot.

COMM:
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. MARGRET NAMPALA:
Pollination takes up to three months. The people who govern vanilla in this region tell us to pollinate only nine flowers on each bunch, for us we pollinate ten flowers and better still the pods are looking bigger.

COMM:
Only a limited number of countries have the right ecological conditions to grow vanilla... Uganda is one of them.

When Margret first started farming vanilla she was taking a risk. But it paid off as Uganda’s vanilla industry built an export market. Vanilla farmers saw their chance when a price war among traditional vanilla exporting countries like Indonesia led to a collapse in prices. And hurricane damage had devastated the plantations of the world’s major exporter – Madagascar.

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.

AGA SEKALALA, Vanilla exporter:
What we needed to do was mobilise the farmers assure them of a market and then from then we drew up... once they were in operation, 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.

CHRISTOPHER WALI, Farm Project Worker:
There was a project whereby I used to work with the extension officers, used to work with these farmers. I had 12 lady farmers. Our main work was to promote vanilla on the smallholders’ farms.

COMM:
Vanilla accounts for only 2 per cent of Uganda’s agriculture. But every kilo of vanilla exported is worth $120 to the exporter and up to $25 to the farmer. The money vanilla brings in has played a key role in reducing poverty among food crop producers.

Margaret and farmers like her are already seeing the benefits. But others question whether there are enough farmers like Margret to guarantee a prosperous future for Uganda.

DR. SAM AGATRE OKUONZI, National Council for Children:
How significant is that vanilla farmer in the economy of the country? How significant is that farmer? How many farmers are like that in this country? And why is it that it is only in Mukono in that part, that these kind of farmers have come up? What has happened to the rest of the country?

PART TWO

COMM:
To the donors who loaned money to Uganda in the 1990s – the economic success of low inflation, over 6 per cent growth and large scale poverty reduction is proof that their approach to development really works. And now they’re coming to see the results first-hand.

Margret and her family join the convoy and ride in unaccustomed style to their vanilla plantation... which, they explain, has proved to be a very lucrative venture... so far.

MARGRET and SON:
You are most welcome. This is our farm. A vanilla plantation. A lot - a lot has been achieved recently ...because of vanilla.

We have managed to…take our children to school – up to university level - probably having a better living compared to any other person.

So we would like to take you around the plantation...

SHENGMAN ZHANG, Managing Director, World Bank:
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. Indeed I think the young man or the gentleman was saying that in very 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...

COMM:
What the donors want to hear is that their intervention – the economic conditions their money helped bring about - has helped Uganda modernise and develop. But not everyone is convinced.

DR. SAM AGATRE OKUONZI:
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.

COMM:
But development is about more than just individual success stories. There are other ways life is getting better right across Uganda. Margret’s children still have to fetch water. But that water is now clean... Health services too have improved.

Margret’s husband has two other wives and eleven other children. She’s looking after an extended family as four of her adult relatives have died from Aids. 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.

MARGRET:
The well was there but the water just flowed - now for the last few years we’ve had pipes. The hospital was there but not like the standard we have now. They can heal anaemia, they can help women to give birth... So the services now are better than from 1986.

Even the transport that takes you there is good. Before when we went into labour we would just walk there but there are now vehicles are there. The standard of living has greatly changed.

COMM:
Education is another indicator of Uganda’s progress. Margret’s children are going to school. In 1994 less than a third of children went to primary school - today it's 97% of those eligible... The Ugandan government’s Universal Primary Education programme and Margret’s vanilla income has helped her children - from Primary to Secondary and now beyond. Her family has stepped out of poverty... in one generation

MARGARET:
The first one is 24 years and at university in Kampala in his fourth year of mechanical engineering. The second one is at Uganda Christian university in Mukono in the third and final year of his education degree.

COMM:
Uganda’s government argues its education policies will help it meet its poverty reduction programme goals – by cutting the birth rate and making people more economically productive. But there’s more than one side to the argument...

CHRIS KASSAMI, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Finance:
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 primary education then that on its own will drive down population growth because people delay decisions of getting children they also look after those they have better.

HELLEN WANGUSA, African Women’s Economic Policy Network:
The concentration and the emphasis was on enrolment. OK, what about retention? What about quality of education? What about infrastructure? What about teacher-pupil ratios? Therefore you are talking about transfer of knowledge and skills. There was a study that was done by Uganda National Examinations Board, and this was after six years of universal primary education and they clearly say 96% of children in the rural schools could neither read nor write, after six years of universal primary education.

COMM:
Critics say Margret’s success just isn’t reflected across the population as a whole. In a country of 25 million people – they say - there are enormous regional disparities in resources, wealth and government spending. And one third of Ugandans still live on less than a dollar a day. Success – the argument goes – can’t be measured simply in economic headlines.

ANDREW MWENDA, Independent Journalist & Broadcaster:
The Government is simply doing what the World Bank and IMF call "providing an enabling environment". An enabling environment meaning ensuring that there are roads, there's electricity, there are telephones, there's a proper macro-economic policy framework, and there's low inflation. That's all that government is doing. But in a third-world country like Uganda, the role of government be would much more important than that. It would mean identifying which sectors will give Uganda competitive edge in international trade, and then identify the kind of policy and other incentives - policy incentives, tax incentives or financial incentives like cheap credit, like tax exemptions, like state subsidies to the private sector in order to lure private investors to take certain risks to invest in certain areas. Now that investment is not taking place because of the lack of these incentives and because it is not taking place, Uganda's economy, most likely is going to stagnate.

DR. SAM AGATRE OKUONZI, National Council for Children:
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.

CHRIS KASSAMI:
We are trying to see what things we did right – the investments that brought up the decline in poverty and some of the things we could have done better. So yes we have to look at our strategy and even invest in other areas which we might not have invested in before.

SHENGMAN ZHANG, Managing Director, World Bank:
Unless miracles happen based on really continued hard work they'll probably fall short on many of the goals, but they will be getting closer to the goals, so I think the fact that you don't make goal does not mean you are not making progress.

COMM:
With Uganda still 4 billion dollars in debt, and donor funding still accounting for half of the Government’s budget, Uganda has a long hard road ahead, if it’s to meet the Millennium Development Goal of cutting poverty by half by 2015.

HELLEN WANGUSA, African Women's Economic Policy Network (AWEPON):
If we are 40 and above, 42, 48 per cent donor funded you cannot call that a success because if that’s pulled out as a country we collapse… So those are the things I would want to factor into this image that Uganda is a success story... I think for me Uganda is a refurbishing economy in terms of refurbish to a certain level, but we really are yet to deal with the fundamentals that will help us develop an economy to a level where we can sustain ourselves.

COMM:
With the government juggling the bigger long term issues – loans, deficits, education, health and welfare - it’s left to the individual – in this free market liberal economy to make what they can, when they can... as has been case with vanilla.

AGA SEKALALA, Food exporter:
We are saying let government help us, make sure the quality is maintained then the Private Sector should be given more incentives. We must move into the rural areas, we must invest more money in farmers – in other words we must give them credit, give them support, must give them training, it’s possible… peace is number one, politics must be right also and we must be able to do more there’s no problem at all... it’s a big achievement

COMM:
Margret’s story shows how there can be a way out of poverty. And she’s earned a lot as the cash from vanilla came in. 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 - something she wouldn’t have been able to do 20 years ago...

MARGRET:
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. We have planted cocoa and it is up like this, that is the new plant we have started so we expect to harvest 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 and make money everyday.

COMM:
Uganda can’t guarantee a prosperous future simply by encouraging farmers like Margret to switch to vanilla. There are signs that its economic model and its partnership with development donors is starting to work. But these are still early days.

END

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