What has become of NAADS and agricultural extension?

National Agricultural Advisory Service (NAADS) that was formed under the NAADS Act of 2001 began its operations by replacing the traditional extension workers with short term contracted service providers to meet specific needs of farmers.

These service providers who were ill-equipped were to provide extension services to several farmer groups in every sub county across the country.

 

NAADS started by providing demonstration kits for training purposes and later on began providing inputs for farmers. Inputs provision became to define the image of NAADS and most people especially politicians started to evaluate them not based on attitudinal change and adoption rates but on the value for money of inputs they supplied.

 

The President kept on talking about restructuring NAADS and even disbanding it. It is therefore very clear that when the Ministry of Agriculture announced they had started recruiting 5,000 extension workers across the country under what they referred to as “Single Spine Extension System” to take up the roles of NAADS service providers to farmers, and Operations wealth creation taking away the role of input procurement and supply, with the termination of contracts of NAADS coordinators, one could say NAADS had been disbanded structurally and only existing legally.

 

It is not right to say the UPDF has taken over NAADS. What is observable is that the component of procuring and distribution of inputs that NAADS was handling was handed over to the UPDF through its Operations wealth creation Initiative, the same way the Ministry of Agriculture has taken over the advisory component of NAADS under its single spine extension system.

 

The Ministry should come out clearly to inform farmers and the public what has become of the NAADS Act and if it’s legal for the UPDF or the Ministry of Agriculture to continue operating under the NAADS Act when the structures have been disbanded. The organizers of Miss Uganda Beauty Pageant came out clearly on the role the UPDF will play in this year selection process and so should the Agriculture’s Minister.

 

The move to separate advisory services from inputs distribution is very important as this was the cause of NAADS purported failure. As an advisory service provider, NAADS had to be evaluated on the attitudinal change of farmers, farmers’ adoptions of improved technologies and their levels of adoptions.

 

As an inputs provider, they were to be evaluated on the quality and quantity of the inputs supplied. When NAADS officials got entangled in procurement deals blinding their sense of public service, birds were bought at the prices of goats, goats at the prices of cows and cows at the prices of elephants, the white elephant NAADS became in the eyes of those who heaped every failure on it.

 

Recently I was at a training workshop in Soroti where a senior civil servant who worked during the time Amin deployed soldiers in Agriculture shared her unpleasant experience with involving the army in Agriculture.

 

She said farmers were forced to plant cotton to the extent that soldiers went scooping soils to confirm whether one had planted seeds. Those who never planted were caned. Farmers and extension workers became demoralized and farmers started roasting seeds before planting so the seeds could not germinate.

 

The UPDF is welcome to play a role in Agriculture but that role should be limited to inputs distribution and they too should understand that farmers and soldiers belong to two different worlds and these two worlds need to intersect widely for this attempt to bear fruits.