Attachment_J.4-_Activities_for_potential_collaboration.pdf

Attachment J.4- Activities for Potential Collaboration

Integrated Community Agriculture and Nutrition Activity The Integrated Community Agriculture and Nutrition Activity’s goal is to enhance resilience of targeted vulnerable populations located within four districts (Lamwo, Kaabong, Kotido, Kisoro). This is a flagship activity under the resilience project focusing primarily on “pull” interventions. The target communities are in rural areas, which have a history of underdevelopment and are characterized by chronic malnutrition and weak connections to markets and between households, communities and their local governance systems. This Activity will allow for the scaling of successful interventions either within existing or neighboring districts. The targeted population will be farmers, agro-entrepreneurs, and their families. Within the targeted population, the primary focus will be on the 14-year old girl, as envisaged in CDCS, and her community, targeting youth, pregnant or lactating women, and young families living at, or closely above or below, the poverty line. Households in this population are in perpetual danger of falling back into poverty, or are considered part of the “churning poor” who oscillate back and forth over the poverty line but are unable to sustain their status above the line and propel themselves further up the economic ladder. This Activity will have a special focus on youth, promoting literacy, numeracy, workforce readiness, and at-risk children staying in schools. It will work with young mothers and fathers to facilitate increased incomes from agriculture and related enterprises and improved nutrition behaviors for themselves and their children. For households and communities to become more secure, they need access to and knowledge of services available to them through district government. The Activity will strengthen both the supply and demand of district services, as well as strengthen community informal systems to better provide support to households.

The goal will be achieved through three outcomes:

Outcome 1: Increased Economic Opportunities for Poor Households Outcome 2: Improved Nutrition, Especially Among Women and Children Outcome 3: Strengthened Community and Local Governance

Achievement of the goal will be reinforced and sustained through: (i) capturing the inherent synergies among the outcomes; and (ii) facilitating the integration of interventions supported by external actors.

External actors will include other USAID implementing partners, local and national government, community based organizations, NGOs, and other donors to ensure longer-term sustainability.

Feed the Future Uganda Producer Organizations Activity

The Producer organization’s Activity primarily seeks to transform producer organizations into commercially viable entities contributing to better functioning agricultural market systems. Specifically, the Activity is working to strengthen the governance, management, and service provision of 26 secondary producer organizations to facilitate improvements in their ability to deliver services, mobilize finance, and create linkages for their member groups, which represent more than 30,000 smallholder farmers. The proposed extension will enable the Activity to nurture the relationships between producer organizations and business development service providers. It will test their efficacy in terms of sustaining activity outcomes, allow them to scale up and institutionalize models and tools across key stakeholders, build organizational capacity to advocate for improvements in the enabling environment, and give ample time for new activities to pick-up some of these relationships and take them to scale.

Feed the Future Uganda Youth Leadership for Agriculture Activity

The Youth Leadership for Agriculture Activity supports Ugandan partners, with youth in the lead, to identify and drive forward sustainable, inclusive, and cost-effective approaches that put youth, especially female youth, squarely in the agriculture sector as leaders, farmers, entrepreneurs, and employees. The purpose of this flagship activity is to increase economic opportunities for approximately 350,000

Ugandan female and male youth ages 10 to 35 in agriculture-related fields in order to increase their incomes and build entrepreneurship, leadership, and workforce readiness skills. The implementation strategy is crafted around a youth-driven approach that prioritizes facilitation, targets in-school and out-of-school youth, and leverages the private sector and workforce institutions to ensure buy-in and sustainability of interventions. The Activity seeks to achieve the following two objectives:

Increase incomes of youth working in agricultural value chains; and improve skills development (entrepreneurship, employability, leadership, and life skills) obtained through formal and non-formal education and training organizations.

Agricultural Business Initiative (aBi) Trust Activity The Agricultural Business Initiative (aBi) Trust is a multi-donor entity devoted to private sector agribusiness development. Through a delegated cooperation agreement with the Royal Danish Embassy, USAID provides funding to the Trust for developing the competitiveness of key commodity value-chains including coffee, maize, and beans. Several other development partners (including Danida, Sida, the EU, Belgium and the Netherlands) also provide support the Trust to enhance performance in other elements of the sector. This arrangement enhances alignment and harmonization of the assistance in order to improve effectiveness and reduce transaction costs for all partners. USAID’s support addresses the agronomic, post-harvest handling, marketing, storage and other critical challenges facing smallholder farmers.

Feed the Future Enabling Environment for Agriculture The Feed the Future Enabling Environment for Agriculture Activity focuses on removing policy and regulatory constraints to agricultural production, processing, marketing, and trade; strengthening capacity of Government of Uganda institutions to facilitate agricultural development and trade; strengthening capacity of Government of Uganda institutions to respond to climate change impacts on agriculture; and enhancing capacity of Ugandan private sector and civil society institutions to contribute to policy decisions. Specifically, the Activity is building the institutional capacity of MAAIF to enable it influence the enabling environment for agriculture in Uganda. The Activity provides technical assistance and capacity building to MAAIF on proper data analysis and reporting, automated data collection processes, and farmer profiling. The Activity uses an apex body called “Leveraging Excellence in Agricultural Development”, which comprises of technical experts in the agricultural sector to drive positive change in the sector.

Agricultural Research Activities Through partnership with USAID, NARO has developed technologies that are almost ready for release and commercialization. Many of these technologies are in strategic value chains for Uganda’s GFSS Country plan implementation. For example, transgenic varieties for bananas, maize and cassava have gone through confined field testing and are only waiting for the enactment of the biotechnology and biosafety law which will allow them to undergo open field testing and release. Technologies developed include nutrient dense and stress resilient varieties which are critical for addressing the challenges of food insecurity and malnutrition. USAID has also partnered with international research organizations to develop proven technologies such as biological control agents, gene technologies, and climate-smart solutions. These technologies can be accessed, applied and deployed for the management of emerging stresses through public private partnerships and collaboration with private sector players.

Power Africa/Uganda Clean Energy Activity Power Africa/Uganda goal is to support the GOU efforts to accelerate investments in cleaner energy (CE) as a means to increase electricity generation capacity and expand electricity access among rural and urban communities. Power Africa focuses on activities that lead to increased cleaner energy generation and access for productive agricultural use (e.g. for post-harvest handling and value added processing), thus contributing to economic growth.

Power Africa activities are designed to add 1,000 MW to the nation’s current generation capacity, and add 500,000 new on-grid connections and 500,000 new off-grid connections (one million new connections in total) by 2020. This Activity is a major component of USAID/Uganda’s larger Power Africa portfolio, and will channel resources through three interrelated work-streams: (i) Power Sector Assessments and CE Project Pipeline Development; (ii) CE Generation and Access Acceleration; and (iii) Enhancing Enabling Environment for CE Investment. In line with the FTF policy objective of supporting Uganda as a source of surplus food for the region, a stable electricity supply for the agricultural sector can be a catalyst for the food industry, including nutrient fortification, and enable farmers to mechanize their operations, improve post-harvest handling, add value to commodities through processing, and make use of modern technologies and facilities. Beyond nutrient fortification, electricity access is a critical component in creating healthy and productive societies, and providing public services (e.g. through cleaner energy for health centers and schools), thus improving the socio-economic and nutritional status of the population. A more stable, cleaner energy supply also enhances FTF support for agro-based industries, and improves agricultural output, incomes, and financial resilience. In addition, the connection of more of the population to cleaner energy (either on-grid electricity or off-grid distributed renewable energy solutions) facilitates the use of energy efficient electronic devices for digital financial services, market information, and agricultural extension, which allows farmers and agribusinesses to be more productive and increases their incomes.

Development Food Security Activities (DFSAs) Food for Peace (FFP)supports multi-year development (i.e., non-emergency) food security activities to improve and sustain the food and nutrition security of vulnerable populations through work at the individual, household and systems level to address the underlying causes of chronic food insecurity and strengthen transformative opportunities. USAID also provides emergency food assistance to address needs arising from natural disasters and complex emergencies often characterized by insecurity and population displacement. In Uganda, at this time, all the emergency resources is targeted to the 1.4 million refugees residing across the country. The framework includes three cross-cutting IRs which integrate the themes of gender equality and youth empowerment, social cohesion and social accountability. The entire framework is informed by, and supports, efforts to build resilience at the individual, household, community and systems levels — not as an objective in and of itself — but as a cross-cutting set of capacities that contribute to the goal of improved food and nutrition security. FFP’s new strategy embraces the critical role of both in-kind and cash-based food assistance as a means of contributing to USAID’s mission of ending extreme poverty and promoting resilient, democratic societies.

FFP recently awarded three DFSAs in Uganda. The two Karamoja DFSA are five year (2017-2022) cooperative agreements with FFP. These activities are implemented by Mercy Corps and Catholic Relief Services in the districts of Abim, Nakapiripirit, Nepak, Kabong, Kotido, Moroto and Amudat. The Kamwenge DFSA is a seven year (2017-2024) cooperative agreement implemented by AVSI Foundation with the goal of supporting extremely poor refugee and Ugandan households to transition from food insecurity and fragile livelihoods to self-reliance and resiliency. As the FFP activities are mostly working at the household and community level, they are focused on pushing people out of poverty. To maximize gains, it will be essential to integrate these activities with IAM, serving as the pull; this will produce a greater overall impact for each activity and improve the lives of thousands of people.

Harvest Plus Harvest Plus is a five year (2016-2021) cooperative agreement whose goal is to reduce micronutrient malnutrition and improve dietary intake of vitamin A and iron in 25 selected districts, targeting 420,000 households. The goal is to increase intake of micronutrient-rich biofortified food crops by children under five years of age and mothers of childbearing age through increased production, consumption and marketing of orange sweet potatoes, orange maize, high iron beans, pearl millet and sorghum. Harvest

Plus disseminates planting material to farmers through direct distribution and payback - where every farmer receiving vine planting material gives two other farmers material after the first harvest. In addition, the activity trains farmers in basic agronomy and nutrition and conducts nutrition sensitization and advocacy through radio, field days, drama and stakeholder meetings. The activity objectives are to: 1) Commercialize biofortified orange sweet potato (OSP) and promote the OSP among targeted vulnerable groups, 2) Support the development, testing, and national release of forthcoming varieties of High-Iron Beans, Vitamin A Orange Maize, Iron-rich Pearl Millet and Sorghum for use and scaling in Uganda, 3) Commercialize forthcoming biofortified crops, and 4) Increase consumption of biofortified crops through nutrition communication and advocacy.

Biodiversity Activities USAID/Uganda’s biodiversity program supports sustainable biodiversity conservation, local economic growth, and building resilient ecosystems and communities in and around priority protected areas, including forest reserves, in Uganda. Activities use applied conservation science and conservation enterprises, including ecotourism, together with conservation education tools to provide opportunities to communities to develop economic services that should enhance their appreciation of Uganda’s natural resources, thereby protecting ecosystems while promoting broader, sustainable economic development. A critical component of building resilient communities and households is preserving the ecosystem services on which they depend. Reduced water availability, invasive species and extreme weather events are some of the shocks that these activities work to address.

Efforts focus on developing and supporting the governance of community conservancy areas as the lynchpin for improving management of protected areas and buffer zones and increasing conservation-based economic growth. Specifically, biodiversity conservation activities concentrate on: 1) building the institutional capacity of the Uganda Wildlife Authority and the National Forestry Authority to manage biodiversity and monitor and mitigate threats; 2) increasing appreciation for Uganda’s biodiversity through education and partnerships; and 3) increasing community and landowner benefits from conservation and wildlife-friendly economic activities, including ecotourism and other conservation enterprises and public private partnerships. Key anticipated outcomes include: reduced threats to biodiversity; improved income of targeted beneficiaries; and increased resilience to shocks and stresses for communities and households in landscapes that include protected areas.

Governance, Accountability, Participation and Performance Program (GAPP) GAPP’s goal is to increase participation, accountability and local governance for effective service delivery. Through this program, USAID works with the supply and demand sides of governance, to enhance the ability of citizens to engage with their representatives and public officials and for local governments to respond to the needs of communities. GAPP also supports national level policy processes in as far as they contribute to improving the enabling environment for service delivery. GAPP focuses on three key components:

1. Support and strengthen national level government accountability institutions in their interaction with local governments: Under this component, GAPP works to strengthen the functions of the accountability sector oversight bodies (Parliamentary Local Government Accounts Committee (LGAC), the OAG, and PPDA) and improve collaboration among them.

2. Strengthen local government revenue, procurement, financial and planning systems: Under this component, USAID provides assistance to LGs to strengthen a foundation for improved service delivery.

3. Strengthen CSOs and other non-state actors (NSAs) to improve citizens' voice and accountability:

Under this component, GAPP supports civil society and other non-state actors in advocacy efforts to provide constructive oversight to local governments, in particular as it relates to transparency and accountability for public service delivery.

Peace Corps (PC) USAID/Uganda and the Peace Corps are committed to continuing the same level of close collaboration previously enjoyed under the Bureau for Food Security-managed Global Food Security PAPA, at the bilateral/country level. USAID/Uganda recognizes the significant potential for Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) to positively affect food security in their communities, and also meet the call for greater interagency collaboration in support of the Global Food Security Strategy (GFSS). USAID and PC share a history of inter-agency collaboration in Uganda. From the beginning of FY 2003 to present, USAID/Uganda has contributed to Peace Corps through the Small Project Assistance (SPA) program for use in promoting a range of community-driven economic growth, agriculture, education, and health activities. PC/Uganda’s buy-in to that global agreement allowed USAID/Uganda to provide $1,000,000 to support implementation of food security programming at post. In total, over $1.5 million in support has been provided to PC/Uganda from USAID/Uganda in the past 12 years. Likewise, PC/Uganda has an extensive network of collaborative opportunities blooming with USAID-funded implementing partners, while support from PCVs remains firmly in the sphere of implementation. As such, the most natural opportunities to collaborate come from initiatives where a partner with resources, but little field presence, connects with PCVs who have been provided with few resources, but live and work in the communities where the IP is attempting to have a positive impact. The interagency agreement transfers FTF funds from USAID/Uganda to Peace Corps directly. The activity supports Peace Corps staff, Volunteers, and counterparts to impact household food security through increased training, conferences, staff support, and grant resources.

The United States African Development Foundation (USADF) USADF is an independent U.S. Government agency established by Congress to support African-owned enterprises which improve lives in poor and vulnerable communities in Africa. The foreign assistance in Africa is an investment in local economic development for peace and security today and prosperous U.S.

trading partners tomorrow. USADF invests directly in community enterprises, providing seed capital and local technical support to early stage agriculture, off-grid energy and youth-led enterprises in Africa.

USADF country program staff and partners provide oversight and technical expertise to grow and expand community enterprises which ensures security, stability and prosperity in conflict and post-conflict areas in Africa. USADF invests directly, providing seed capital and local technical support to early stage agriculture, energy and youth-led African enterprises. USADF awards grants maximum of $250K to African organizations for operational assistance, enterprise expansion, and linkages to new markets and follow-on funding to sustain growth.

NU-TEC Market Development (NU-TEC MD) Project NU-TEC Market Development funded by the UK Government focuses on improving business, improving lives, and catalysing inclusive and sustained growth in the agri-economy of Northern Uganda. NU-TEC MD provides expertise and consulting services to innovative business models and shifts agricultural market dynamics in a way that supports triple bottom line improvements in firm and market performance

– economic, social and environmental. NU TEC MD brokers relationships and works with private sector firms in agricultural markets to identify, attract and support investments that drive growth and support increases in income and climate resilience for smallholders in Northern Uganda. The project applies a particular focus to catalyse change for women and vulnerable groups. NU-TEC MD also supports pioneering firms to navigate the constraints of operating in the agri-economy of Northern Uganda and co-develops and pilots inclusive business models that generate economic, social and environmental returns.

NU-TEC MD adopts the ‘making markets work for the poor’, or ‘M4P’ framework (i.e. a market systems approach). M4P is an economic development approach that works with local partners (including businesses, government agencies, public associations and universities) to identify and overcome key constraints that limit inclusive growth within a target market or sector. To support private sector investment, NU-TEC MD analyses markets to understand key growth constraints and establishes triple bottom line growth opportunities. The project partners with motivated private sector firms to design market-led business innovations that lead to increased profitability and economic growth. NU-TEC MD promotes engagement between the private sector and government agencies to design appropriate policy frameworks that stimulate investments in rural markets and drive private sector growth. NU-TEC MD works in agricultural commodity and supports service markets that show high potential for growth in Northern Uganda. Initial markets include sunflower, soybean, land preparation, seeds, and aggregation and storage, with the potential for NU-TEC MD to expand into additional markets with the right partners.

Expected Outcomes include growth of the agri-economy in Northern Uganda, reduction of risk for pioneering firms investing in Northern Uganda and increase in their profitability while simultaneously enhancing the climate resilience and incomes of the poor.

USAID Uganda Anticipated Learning Activity

The USAID/Uganda anticipates awarding a follow on Activity the recently concluded Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Program (The Learning Contract). The purpose of this Activity will be to provide monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) support services, and to build the capacity of USAID/Uganda to implement USAID’s Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) approach to strengthen the implementation of the USAID/Uganda Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS). The CLA approach is a key component of the USAID/Uganda CDCS that provides guidance and reference for implementation, learning, and course correction. The central function of CLA is to ensure that progress toward development objectives is guided by continuous learning and iterative adaptation of program and strategy implementation.