Agriculture
For a country where roughly six in ten households depend on crop farming and nearly four in ten keep livestock, the announcement that came out of the Protea Hotel in Entebbe on Thursday was, on its face, a modest one: a national "inception workshop" for a project few Ugandans had heard of. But the Accelerating Food Systems Transformation for Resilience to Climate Change in Africa project, launched by Lands, Housing and Urban Development Minister Judith Nabakooba, is aimed squarely at a problem that has quietly undercut nearly every other agricultural intervention Uganda has tried in the past decade: insecure land, uninsured livestock, and a policy apparatus that reacts to climate shocks rather than anticipating them.
The three-year initiative is not a Uganda-only affair. It is being rolled out in parallel in Kenya and Somalia between 2026 and 2028, coordinated by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in partnership with the African Union's Inter-African Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR) and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), alongside national governments. The pitch is straightforward: livestock-based food systems across the Horn and East Africa are being battered by increasingly erratic rainfall, and none of the usual fixes — more vaccines, more extension officers, more relief food — will hold if the underlying land and risk-management systems stay broken.
In Uganda, the project will focus on four areas: land tenure security, livestock value chains, index-based livestock insurance, and climate-land information systems that are meant to feed evidence into policymaking rather than leaving ministries to guess. According to a statement released by the lands ministry, findings from the assessments are expected to "generate evidence to inform policy reforms" and support the country's broader climate adaptation and food-systems agenda.
Speaking at the launch, Nabakooba told participants that climate change "continues to threaten livelihoods, food security and economic growth through prolonged droughts, floods, land degradation and escalating conflicts over natural resources" — a line that reads less like a diplomatic flourish and more like a description of the past eighteen months in Uganda's cattle corridor and northern drylands. Karamoja has recorded hunger-related deaths and emergency food procurement this year; Kasese and other cattle-keeping districts have reported livestock losses to dry spells; and disputes between crop farmers and pastoralists over wetlands and grazing corridors have drawn in district officials from Ngora to Kasese. Nabakooba argued that "resilient food systems require secure land rights, reliable climate information, sound policies and strong institutions working together" — in other words, that Uganda's climate problem is also a governance problem.
Why land tenure, specifically? Uganda's land tenure landscape is a patchwork of customary, mailo, freehold and leasehold systems, and in pastoral and agro-pastoral areas — Karamoja, Teso, parts of Ankole and the cattle corridor — grazing rights are often informal, seasonal and increasingly contested as population growth, wetland encroachment and land degradation shrink the available range. Secure tenure, the theory goes, gives farmers and herders the confidence to invest in soil conservation, water harvesting or paddock improvements rather than treating land as a resource to be exploited before someone else claims it, or before drought forces a herd onto someone else's pasture. The lands ministry's own framing leans hard on this logic, describing secure land tenure as something that "encourages investment, boosts agricultural productivity, reduces land-related conflicts and enables communities to better adapt."
The index-based livestock insurance component may prove the more technically demanding piece of the puzzle. Regional discussions around the project — echoing a parallel launch in Kenya reported by UNECA — have already flagged that existing livestock insurance products across the region suffer from weak design, poor affordability, low renewal rates and slow payouts, precisely the failures that keep pastoralists from buying in even when insurance exists on paper. Index-based products pay out automatically when satellite-derived indicators — vegetation cover, rainfall deficits — cross a drought threshold, in theory sparing herders the drawn-out loss-assessment process that bogs down conventional livestock insurance. But designing a product that pays out fast enough to matter, and cheaply enough for a smallholder pastoralist to afford the premium, has proven difficult everywhere it has been tried in East Africa. Uganda's insurance market for agriculture remains thin: Bank of Uganda's own Q1 2026 credit conditions survey recorded double-digit net tightening in agricultural lending and average agricultural interest rates above 20 percent, an environment in which insurance uptake has historically lagged far behind demand.
The fourth pillar — climate-land information systems — is arguably the connective tissue for the other three. Without reliable, localised data on where land degradation is worst, where drought risk is concentrated, and which grazing corridors are under the most pressure, neither land-tenure reform nor insurance product design can be properly targeted. Uganda's Ministry of Water and Environment has separately been building out early-warning systems following its own alerts this year about an emerging El Niño pattern expected to bring above-normal rainfall — and, paradoxically, both flooding and drought risk — between August and December.
For Uganda's cattle-corridor communities, the practical stakes are significant. Livestock accounts for a meaningful share of rural household wealth in Karamoja, Teso and the Ankole sub-region, and successive droughts — most visibly the hunger crisis in Karamoja that Parliament and Cabinet were still responding to as recently as July — have exposed how little of that wealth is currently protected against climate shocks. A workable insurance product, backed by secure grazing and water rights, could in theory let a herder rebuild after a bad season instead of losing a herd entirely and falling back into the cycle of emergency relief that has defined Karamoja's recent history.
The broader economic case is one the government has been making across several fronts this year: agriculture grew 6.7 percent in the 2025/26 financial year according to figures Uganda's leadership has publicised, and the sector's GDP share has climbed toward 27 percent, but that growth has been uneven, concentrated in cash crops and larger commercial operations while pastoral and food-crop smallholders lag. A regional food-systems investment plan under negotiation through the East African Community — separate from this project but pointing in the same direction — has already put a $15 billion price tag on the scale of investment regional planners think is needed to make East African food systems climate-resilient.
Whether the Entebbe workshop translates into anything more than another framework document will depend on what happens after the assessments are complete. Nabakooba's own language anticipated the skepticism: she told participants the findings "should not remain on paper" and should instead "inform better policies, guide future investments and strengthen decision-making at both national and local levels." Given how many previous Ugandan agricultural programmes — from NAADS to aspects of the Parish Development Model — have been criticised for good intentions diluted by weak implementation, that will be the test regional donors, and Uganda's own pastoralist communities, will be watching most closely over the next three years.
