“Africa Rural Connect” Winner Hopes to Empower Rural Communities

By Luis Filipe Dias

Staff Writer

Washington — An idea to make small-scale maize growers more successful came a step closer to reality with an award to an innovative Ugandan.

After seeing a series of other projects win Africa Rural Connect (ARC) online contests, Johnstone Baguma Kumaraki of Uganda was surprised and humbled that his proposal was selected as the grand prize winner of the 2010 ARC ideas competition — a program sponsored by the National Peace Corps Association (NPCA).

Farmers in Uganda will benefit from the ideas of Africa Rural Connect’s 2010 winner, ToroDev.

“It’s a great achievement and a milestone for our organization, and it’s a signal of our commitment to empowering rural communities,” said Kumaraki, who is the founder and executive director of Toro Development Network, known as ToroDev.

A panel of judges selected Kumaraki to receive $12,000 to implement a small-scale rural maize project in Uganda.

His project, “Increasing Small Scale Rural Maize Producers’ Revenues by Promoting Maize Value Addition and Collective Marketing in Kyegegwa and Kyenjojo Districts of Western Uganda,” was selected from among 1,200 entries.

“We had several really good ideas, so our judges had a hard time choosing the grand prize winner,” said Molly Mattessich, manager of online initiatives for the NPCA and a former Peace Corps volunteer in Mali. “Kumaraki’s rural maize project serves as a model grass-roots idea for others looking to develop ways to help improve rural Africa.”

According to ToroDev — a community-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) that promotes access to and strategic use of information communication technologies for development in the western region of Uganda — maize has a “multiplier effect” because it serves as a staple food and source of income for farmers’ households in rural communities.

Kumaraki’s idea focuses on increasing the capacity of small-scale rural maize farmers to increase revenues and access to urban markets by providing them with local storage facilities.

He said ToroDev has encouraged rural families to own mobile phones by identifying influential farmers and sending them current market prices via SMS text messages.

“We are taking it a step ahead and looking at issues of how to minimize harvest loss, how to transport crops and how to best store them,” said Kumaraki, who told America.gov that the first step is to agree with farmers on the location of five easily accessible storage centers that also would allow prospective buyers better access for transporting grain to urban markets.

“In the short term, farmers can store their crops in bulk, and in the long run we plan on transforming the facilities into marketing centers — with information points, Internet connection and a place where people could charge their phones,” Kumaraki said.

“Lastly, we are looking at how farmers can establish their own credit facilities or village banks, which could be established in these marketing centers that will be owned by groups of families.”
ARC — launched in 2009 by the National Peace Corps Association, a nonprofit organization supporting returned Peace Corps volunteers and the Peace Corps community — is an online global network that fosters collaborative thinking to respond to the needs of African farmers.

Funded initially by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the ARC project aims to collect ideas from people who live and work in Africa.

“The best ideas come from the ground up and from people collaborating,” Mattessich said. “We initially started with our core and reached out to our network of Peace Corps volunteers that served in Africa and then to rural farmers and to the Africa Diaspora.”

Mattessich explained the website — www.arc.peacecorpsconnect.org — is built around the concept of collaboration, so that an idea that is formed on the site can attract resources and partners and develop into a concrete business plan.

Throughout the year ARC selects eight projects to receive $1,000 grants and then selects a grand prize winner among all entries at the end of the year.

The platform is free to anyone with an Internet connection. The site accepts input on how to improve the collaborative nature of the site and has grown since its inception.

“We have added a new feature, [through] which one can endorse a project by pledging time or money,” Mattessich said. “There are no transactions done directly on the site, but it allows for organizations to connect together.”

Interconnecting organizations is exactly what Kumaraki hopes to see, after the recognition he gained by winning the 2010 ARC ideas competition.
“It’s encouraging when you work hard and you receive an award like this, but more importantly it can open doors in the donor and partnership community,” Kumaraki said. “It would be great to partner with other programs and get more support.”

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)