Income Diversification in Uganda

Building small businesses is important for smallholders in Uganda because nearly 1.7 million households depend on coffee as a major source of income. Those families typically earn less than US$2 per day. Not only is that income not always enough to cover household expenses, but climate change threatens to reduce that income even more because a changing climate means more pests, diseases and increasingly extreme weather patterns that can drastically reduce crop size.

The training and skills that smallholders can access through this partnership with Sawa World and Sucafina Uganda are vital to protecting and increasing smallholder livelihoods in rural Uganda, especially as changing climates and other certainties increasingly threaten income from coffee.

The project, which concluded in July 2022, trained 373 registered Sucafina Uganda farmers in Central Uganda. Those farmers were able to access training and subsidized startup materials to start their own micro businesses. After the training, those farmers launched 183 new microbusinesses and saw an average increase in monthly income by 51%. On the whole, we think that this partnership was a huge success, and we hope that the participating farmers are able to continue leveraging their training and growing their businesses.