Draft responses shared with the Institute for Evolutionary Leadership by

Cleofash Alinaitwe and Ignatius Ahumuza, Co-Founders of Agri Planet Uganda

April 29. 2021

To learn more about Agri Planet Uganda, please watch this 40-min video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc26QpZfbKg&t=678s

1. What is going on globally, in Africa, in Uganda and in your local community with
agriculture, food, production and why you feel it’s important to do something about it?
Today, the world has almost 8 billion people and these are expected to double over the next century. As
the number of people grows, the pressure exerted on the agriculture sector to feed these people keeps
growing. To meet the growing need of food supply, Intensive agricultural systems and practices have
been embraced globally although these have a considerable environmental impact that definitely threatens
the existence of humanity in years to come.

In Africa, more than half of the workforce is employed in the agriculture sector. However, close to 80%
of these are smallholder farmers who are classified as the world’s poorest people. Worse enough,
smallholder farmers use rudimentary farming practices that are non eco-friendly yet these farmers are the
most vulnerable to climate change impacts.

With this context, Africa has a huge potential embedded in its agriculture sector.

In fact, Uganda alone if fully cultivated can feed the entire African continent. The country is home to
some of the world’s significant water bodies and has 80% of its land being arable.

There is need to build capacity of smallholder farmers to enterprisingly produce healthy food, using
systems and practices with very low carbon footprint , to decelerate climate change and feed the
225million people who go to bed hungry everyday in Africa.

2. How did you get started and how your model has evolved over time?
We were born in a peasant farming family and attended to rural schools. Growing up as biological
brothers and going through the same schools gave us chance to even connect further. As Cleofash
continuously developed concerns about the poverty associated with the peasant farmers in our
village(including our own), Ignatius was similary developing concerns of how agriculture was being
taught in school. Cleofash wanted to see that every peasant farmer becomes rich where as Ignatius wanted
agriculture to be taught in a more practical and meaningful way to everyone. For these 2 visions, Cleofash
started organizing fellow university agriculture students and partnering them with local smallholder
farmers to ensure that they support the farmers to succeed. Ignatius was on the other hand empowering
students from his former schools training them how to farm in school gardens.
In 2015, what looked as 2 different visions was fit into one Mission. And this gave birth to Art Planet
Academy (the current Agri Planet Uganda). The team of university students would now move to schools
to offer agricultural trainings to students and establishing demonstrations there. Using the established
school demos, the university students would train the farmer communities on best agronomic practices
plus extra follow up.
3. How does your model look like today?

To date, our model has grown. We embarked on a journey of establishing a Farmers’ Resource Center
that serves as a practical Agricultural knowledge bank. Here, innovations in productive and profitable
farming technologies are either developed or replicated from other places, tested and demonstrated to
farming communities.

Our other community demonstration interventions include model farmer demonstration plots and
established demonstration plots in primary and secondary schools.

Also, the centre enterprisingly acts as a farmer to farmer knowledge exchange platform, serves as a
farmer field school for productive agricultural practices, links farmers to productive markets, and offers
quality agricultural inputs to smallholder farmers.

Event has been bringing together different stake holders such as financial institutions, government, other
private sector players, students, and farmers for training in permaculture, while initiating conversations
around reimagining the agriculture landscape of our region to make it more sustainable. This event blends
learning, with entertainment, cultural practices and sports.

Other events held at the center include Youth camps through which we inspire and motivate youth to
practice permaculture on residential and non residential boot camps.

The Agri tourism service enables schools, indigenous groups and other international tourists to visit our
center
To extend these permaculture practices to communities, the organization started the Agri Leadership and
Entrepreneurship Academy to offer structured trainings.

The Agri Leadership and entrepreneurship Academy is the structured training organ of Agri Planet
Uganda and is housed at the farmers’ resource center. We have developed an in-house training that
enables us to identify, train and support the next generation of enterprising permaculture leaders using the
demonstrations established at the farmers’ resource center. The training prepares youth of ages between
16 and 25 years with the skills required to start a permaculture enterprise. The trainees are then supported
to run their enterprises through mentorship, providing linkage to opportunities, and continuous tailored
technical support.

In Our permaculture for kids program, we work with schools to organize learners into school
permaculture clubs. We then use an experiential learning approach to train school learners to
establishment a student led school model permaculture enterprises in schools. Communities affiliated and
around the school are trained at these established school models on specific community training days.
Each participating school learner together with a respective parent are assisted to replicate this knowledge
into their home. Consequently as a result, a similar model
Due to COVID 19 restrictions, public gatherings were banned and this rendered our trainings impossible.
We therefore initiated the Agri Edutainment program through which we team up support local musicians
and support them to record and produce songs about agriculture and farming that are played on local radio
stations. This initiative enabled us to team up with various radio stations and as well gave birth to our
medi programs. Every month, we get radio talk time to train the locals on permaculture practices since
physical gatherings are still on the ban.
 4. What is your impact so far (include stories of people we’ve engaged in our activities
before)?
since 2015 todate, we have been able to work with more than 45 primary schools, 36 secondary schools, 2
universities and 4 vocational institutions. Through these institutions, we have reached at least 20000
students and about 5000 associated parents that practice farming.
Currently, we are actively engaged with 5 schools where we are training 250 students and reaching 176
associated parents in farming.
Our farmers resource center has hosted the 1 st, the 2nd, and the third annual agri planet farm training days
reaching more than 1450 people with the last event brining together 273 farmers.
Our youth camps have seen 245 young men and women receive permaculture based trainings.
Through our Agri Leadership and Entrepreneurship Academy that started 2020, we have 5 youth that we
are training and supporting to established permaculture based social enterprises in their communities to
support and impact smallholder farmers in their grassroots communities.
5. What is your vision for the future of Uganda and Africa?

The vision is to see that each smallholder farmer can grown his own healthy food sustainably with a
community supported ecosystem that appreciates organically grown food ahead of factory-made food
stuff. We want to make every village a permaculture food bank with various permaculture resource
centers.

6. How are you contributing to this future now, and how you see your role might evolve?

Currently, we are supporting practicing farmers to redesign their farming culture through demonstration
and training. We are also empowering the young generation by redefining the narrative around
agricultural practices so that by the time they are in position to farm, the decisions they make will be the
best ones for our nature, and sustainability.

P.S. Note from Fyodor Ovchinnikov from the Institute for Evolutionary Leadership: Since these
responses were submitted, Cleo has shared a strategy for changing related national-level policies in
Uganda. Right now they are working with a very supportive district government and they also see the
potential to replicate such collaborative relationship with other district governments. Once there is a
critical mass of district governments that are on board with supporting permaculture practices in their
districts, there will be time for a national campaign to align Uganda’s policies with the needs of
permaculture farmers. In order to involve more districts, Cleo and Ignatius started educating agri-
entrepreneurs who can work with farmers and governments across Uganda. This is my current
understanding of their strategy. You can learn more directly from Cleo and Ignatius.