Dear Toby & Will,

We live in a remote part of eastern Uganda where we have seen extreme poverty our entire lives.

We have a vision for a more direct, more immediate solution to this scourge, but we are simply resourceless.

By all standards, we are essentially shut off from the rest of the world. Even the new 17 UN Global Goals do not mean anything to us, if we the poor at the grassroots only remain passive participants—as it has been for decades.

We needed to share with you our Concept Note, and to ask that you share it too with the effective altruism community. What we would need is people who could directly work with us as a team to take our vision to full scale.

The UCF, an agriculture social enterprise that we started in 2014, is lifting the poorest rural households from extreme poverty in eastern Uganda through direct income generation from fresh organic ginger.

There is more demand for ginger in Uganda than is being produced locally and, to supplement the local supply, more ginger is even imported from countries like Ethiopia into Uganda. That is the part of the agriculture value chain that the UCF aims to leverage—to lift rural poor Ugandans from extreme poverty.

The UCF is doing this both by providing rural smallholder farmers with technical training on organic ginger, and by pooling together these small farmers’ ginger produce and marketing it under a single umbrella of the UCF. This gives the smallholder farmers an opportunity to have a combined production that can attract large institutional buyers—e.g. wholesale grocers and bottling companies like coca cola—enabling these farmers to get better prices and high-value markets that they could not access before.

The project shall directly put each participating rural household above the poverty line right from Year 1, by creating incomes of at least $2,600 per household in the first year alone–representing $7/day–from an initial input of only 20 kg of ginger rhizomes. This means, if a household only doubles their work and plants 40 kg of ginger rhizomes in Year 2, that will earn them $5,200+ in Year 2, averaging at $14/day.

And, from Year 2 onward, the income from the ginger being grown at our 2 training & demonstration centers shall ultimately enable us to self-finance 100% of the UCF’s total administrative overheads and project scaling costs, making the whole project 100% financially self sufficient.

What we need now is to raise a flat $134,304 to take our vision to full maturity.

Please see our Concept Note (PDF):
http://bit.ly/1QYVyMW

Learn more on the UCF website:
http://www.ugandafarm.org/

That’s all we wanted to share with you.

Kind regards,

Anthony
___________
Anthony Kalulu,

Founder, UCF.
P.O Box 16
Kamuli, Uganda.

info@ugandafarm.org
Tel: +256-781-350888
_______________

http://www.ugandafarm.org