Africa-Press – Uganda. Mr Fred Bwino Kyakulaga, the State Minister for Agriculture, has asked young innovators to pass on the knowledge they have to local farmers in the villages so as to improve their farming methods.
“If your current goal concentrates on disseminating or coming up with innovative ways of disseminating this kind of information to the population, you will go a long way in transforming our local villages,” he said on Saturday while presiding over Roots Africa annual agriculture conference at Makerere University.
Mr Kyakulaga said the agricultural sector is battling calamities some of which are natural and asked the innovators to find ways of rescuing the situation.
“Other key pressing issues include innovations around seeds, solving challenges of diseases, resistance to extreme weather, and outreach to the market and value addition among others. As government, we’re doing our best to overcome all these,” he said.
Dr Dickson Tayebwa, a lecturer at Makerere University, said the world is driven by innovations which need to be appreciated to become self-reliant.
“Our president has always advocated for self-reliance manifested through increasing the tax on the products that are coming in. Hiked taxes on imports are to stimulate locally made products to enable the local producers to blossom and stand for themselves,” he noted.
Dr Tayebwa pleaded to the minister to lobby for more support towards students’ innovations saying far beyond the support, let him lobby so that the products that they have come up with go beyond the bureaucratic and constraining systems.
The students were asked to use the small incomes they have to venture into high-value enterprises at a small scale for small landholders.
Students showcased different innovations including modern preservative methods of dry foods to reduce post-harvest losses.
For instance, foods like Matooke are cut into pieces and dried by solar power energy to keep it longer.
Corrine Bekula Biira, a student from Gulu University, led a team that made tamarind drinks using locally grown tamarind fruits.
They have now created a market for tamarind growers in northern Uganda and are planning to secure a trademark from the Uganda Bureau of Standards.
Mr Cedric Nwafor, a Cameroon national and the founder of Roots Africa conceived the new ideas of modern farming from the USA to help farmers in Africa to be successful.
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