Right Target, Wrong Mechanism? Agricultural Modernization and Poverty Reduction in Uganda

By G. Bahiigwa, Danny Rigby, P. Woodhouse. 2005

123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Household consumption surveys suggest that the downward trend in rural poverty indicators recorded in Uganda during the 1990s has been reversed since 2000. This paper examines the Ugandan government’s strategy to reduce rural poverty, the Plan for Modernization of Agriculture (PMA). It argues that, while there appear few better choices of “target” for the PMA than to improve incomes of the rural poor through increased agricultural productivity, emphasis on decentralization as a mechanism for poverty reduction is misplaced in the current political context of Uganda. The paper considers what alternative mechanisms might better deliver reductions in rural poverty.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6f890cfe8a8e0874545a304f879d99188cff43d1

How researchers see this paper

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1. Admos Chimhowu
2. P. Woodhouse

Citations in the corpus

• Decentralization's Effects on Educational Outcomes in Bolivia and Colombia (2008, unknown): “Similarly, Bahiigwa, Rigby, and Woodhouse (2005) and Francis and James (2003) show that decentralization in Uganda has not led to independent, accountable local governments, but rather to their capture by local elites, and hence to the failure of decentralization as a tool for poverty reduction.”
• Customary vs Private Property Rights? Dynamics and Trajectories of Vernacular Land Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa (2006, background): “A detailed discussion of agricultural development trajectories in Africa is beyond the scope of this paper, but the tensions – which some (notably Sender and Johnston 2004) would deny are ‘tensions’ – between ‘pro-poor’ and productivityenhancing goals within agricultural modernization strategies hav”