Beyond handouts, Uganda must graduate families into productivity
Uganda already possesses much of this architecture through the Parish Development Model, NUSAF, GROW, social protection, agricultural extension, vocational skilling and refugee livelihood interventions.
Beyond handouts, Uganda must graduate families into productivity
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By Simon Mulongo
During the week, I presided over the National Symposium on the Ultra Poor Graduation Model and Refugee Self-Reliance Index in Kampala. Government, development partners and practitioners gathered around a deceptively simple question. How does a poor household move beyond surviving poverty and acquire the productive capacity to leave it sustainably?
That question belongs beyond conference rooms because Uganda still carries substantial economic vulnerability. The 2024 Population and Housing Census recorded about 10.7 million households, with approximately 3.5 million, or 33 per cent, remaining in the subsistence economy.
About three-quarters of these households depend primarily on subsistence agriculture. Our challenge, therefore, is not simply poverty of income. It is also poverty of productive opportunity.
The graduation approach offers a useful response. Graduation should not mean completing a project, receiving a grant or disappearing from a beneficiary register. It should represent a measurable transition from vulnerability towards productivity, resilience and greater economic independence. A family leaving assistance today, only to return after drought, illness or crop failure, has exited a programme but has not escaped poverty.
Consider a Ugandan widow cultivating a small plot in Yumbe and a refugee mother supporting her family in the same district. Their legal circumstances differ, yet their economic realities may be strikingly similar. Both may possess labour but little capital, produce crops without adequate storage and sell immediately after harvest when prices are weakest. Both may remain one serious shock away from losing years of modest progress.
A person may be trained and remain unemployed. A farmer may produce more but earn less. A borrower may acquire debt rather than wealth. Development works when these separate interventions become rungs on the same ladder.
Sustainable graduation therefore requires careful sequencing. Social protection provides an initial floor, while skills, coaching and agricultural extension strengthen productive capability.
Appropriate assets and finance enable enterprise, while SACCOS, cooperatives and producer organisations strengthen savings, scale and bargaining power. Storage, aggregation, processing and dependable markets then convert greater production into sustainable household income.
Uganda already possesses much of this architecture through the Parish Development Model, NUSAF, GROW, social protection, agricultural extension, vocational skilling and refugee livelihood interventions.
The greater challenge is convergence. A poor household should not experience government as several projects, each arriving with separate forms, meetings and targets. Public interventions should increasingly meet around the household and create one coherent pathway towards economic independence.
Host communities themselves face pressure on land, infrastructure, natural resources and employment. We should therefore avoid constructing one economy for refugees and another for Ugandans. Roads, irrigation systems, markets, vocational institutions and agricultural value chains should strengthen the economic space shared by both communities. Poverty rarely respects administrative categories, and opportunity should not be unnecessarily constrained by them.
Uganda already offers useful evidence. The Development Response to Displacement Impacts Project created employment opportunities for more than 174,000 people, including over 27,000 refugees. Participating households recorded annual incomes more than 17 per cent higher than non-participating households, while over 5,100 hectares of degraded land were restored. This demonstrates how livelihoods, income, environmental restoration and community assets can reinforce each other.
The same thinking should transform how we measure results. Suppose 10,000 households enter a livelihood programme and 7,000 initially record increased incomes. A 70 per cent result sounds impressive. However, if only 4,000 sustain those gains after intensive support ends, durable graduation is closer to 40 per cent. Statistics should reveal the distance travelled, not merely decorate expenditure.
Our development scorecard must therefore become more demanding. Instead of asking only how many people were trained, we should establish how many earn from those skills twelve months later. Rather than counting enterprises financed, we should measure survival, growth and jobs created. For farmers, meaningful indicators include productivity, marketable surplus, real household income, savings and the capacity to withstand shocks.
There is also a fiscal argument. When the same household repeatedly returns for assistance, poverty becomes a recurring public liability. When that household produces, saves, invests, employs another person and participates in markets, it becomes an economic asset. At sufficient scale, graduation therefore moves beyond social policy and becomes part of national economic transformation.
The principle is clear. Social protection must provide a floor, but productivity must provide the future. Skills, productive capital, markets, savings and insurance should progressively turn vulnerable households into resilient economic actors. Uganda should therefore measure success not by how many people complete programmes, but by how many never need to return. True graduation means moving families permanently towards productivity, resilience, self-reliance and dignity
The Writer is the Minister of State - Labour Employment & Industrial Relations