Facilitating Smallholder Farmers’ Market Access
In the OIC Member Countries
49
implies reduced access to markets.
Urbanization may still be at an early stage in Uganda, but it appears to be accelerating. The
Uganda Bureau of Statistics estimates that the urban population grew from 2 million
people in 2002 to 6.4 million in 2013. The widening gap between average incomes in
agriculture and the economy as a whole also suggests that incentives are in place to
encourage individuals to leave agriculture for jobs in other sectors, often in or near urban
centers. For this transition to work well, however, rural people must receive the education
and health services that prepare them for work in other sectors. Those who remain in
agriculture must find ways to connect to the growing demand for food in urban areas.
maps indices of market access94 against the share of population residing in rural
areas. The figure shows that greater market access accompanies a decline in the rural
population. As discussed, Uganda’s largely rural population has low access to markets in
absolute terms, but the country is still on-trend compared to other countries for which
data are available, and market access is better than in several comparable countries.
Still, the challenge of bringing more than a million small farms into domestic food chains is
daunting. Uganda has no tradition of integrated food chains, and the formal contractual
relationships that guarantee timely delivery to markets and safe food products are
underdeveloped. As illustrates, some firms and farmers are managing to forge
solutions to those problems, however.
94 Developed by Roberts, Shyam, and Rastogi (2006).
FIGURE 26: MARKET ACCESS AND RURAL POPULATION SHARE
Source: Roberts, Shyam and Rastogi 2006.