Impact of Uganda’s National Agricultural Advisory Services Program

Abstract

The importance of agricultural extension in agricultural and rural development is widely known, so it is not surprising that agricultural extension has attracted substantial investment of public resources since the 1950s, when national agricultural advisory services began to be formally established by governments, and has strongly returned to the international development agenda (World Bank 2007a). Due to competing uses of public resources for promoting overall growth and equitable distribution, however, careful reflection of the impacts of and returns to public spending in agricultural advisory services is necessary. This is the aim of this study, which focuses on the NAADS program in Uganda that has been implemented since 2001. The NAADS program, which is a key strategy for implementing the government’s poverty reduction and national development plan, was conceived as a move away from the top-down approach that is publicly funded, with services provided by public agents, to a demand-driven approach that is still largely publicly funded but with services provided by the private sector. The program targets the development and use of farmer institutions and in the process seeks to empower them to procure enterprise-based advisory services, manage linkages with marketing partners, and conduct monitoring and evaluation of the advisory services they receive from the private sector (Uganda, NAADS Secretariat 2001). By end of the 2006–07 financial year, the period of the analysis in this study, about UGX 110 billion (in 2000 UGX) had been spent on the program, which had been extended to 545 subcounties (about 83.1 percent of the total subcounties in Uganda at the time) from the initial 24 subcounties in six districts where it had been launched.1 Furthermore, about 1,622 contracts with private-sector service providers had been signed, more than 40 enterprises had been promoted, and about 40,000 farmer groups and 716,000 farmers (representing about 20 percent of the national farming households) had received services from the program (Uganda, NAADS Secretariat 2007).