Eggs can easily fight rural poverty

Feb 06, 2008

Letter of the day <br><br>EDITOR—The problem in Uganda, as is the case in Kenya and other African countries, is unequal distribution of the national cake. The consequence is that many rural communities in Uganda are extremely poor. The government of Uganda seems to be quite aware of the problem,

Letter of the day

EDITOR—The problem in Uganda, as is the case in Kenya and other African countries, is unequal distribution of the national cake. The consequence is that many rural communities in Uganda are extremely poor. The government of Uganda seems to be quite aware of the problem, hence the ‘Bona Bagaggawale’ initiative. However, in my opinion, the present approach to ‘Bona bagagawale’ is doomed to fail.

My suggestion is that the government should introduce a school-feeding programme in order to redistribute national wealth and create jobs. I will give only one example to show how I think it can work. It is easy to prove that a poultry farmer who keeps 500 layers could easily earn a net profit of almost sh600,000 per month from egg sales. That would be equivalent to the salary of three primary teachers! The problem is the limited market for the eggs and yet this country has more than 10 million school-going children/students whose per capita consumption of eggs and milk is very low. School children/students (and the army) are a huge potential local market which is untapped. What the government should do is to set aside in the national budget some money in the ministries of education, disaster preparedness, health, gender, agriculture, defence and others to buy eggs from poultry farmers who should be evenly distributed across the country.

As long as the purchase of the eggs is distributed regionally well, the problem of rural poverty would slowly reduce. This way we would create jobs for the huge disgruntled, unemployed populations that are being churned out of our education systems every year. If we do not take urgent action now, we should not be surprised to find Uganda exploding Kenya style. The faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Makerere University would probably be able and willing to contribute to this type of exercise; through large scale training of poultry or dairy farmers.

Dr. Deo Olila
Faculty of Veterinary Medicine,
Makerere University

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