Feature
Ask a woman farmer in Teso what she does with her millet, groundnuts or cassava, and the answer is usually the same: she sells it fresh or dried, at the farm gate, to whoever comes with a bicycle or a truck. The price she gets is set by the harvest glut, not by her. The processing, which is where the margin sits, happens somewhere else, and so does the profit.
A pair of announcements this week suggests the government wants to change that equation. On 8 October the Daily Monitor reported that the government has allocated Shs7.7 billion to the National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO) and Soroti University to set up facilities that help women add value to farm produce and build agribusinesses in the Teso sub-region. Two days later, Nile Post reported that the Minister of Gender, Labour and Social Development, Henry Tumukunde, had announced a new window of non-repayable grants of up to Shs107.07 million for women-owned businesses that missed out on GROW loans. Both flow from the same programme, and together they are the most concrete sign yet of how it intends to spend the remaining time on its clock.
What was announced
The Shs7.7 billion comes through the Generating Growth Opportunities and Productivity for Women Enterprises (GROW) project, which is funded by the Ugandan government with the World Bank. Soroti University receives Shs3.5 billion for a value-addition facility, and NARO receives Shs4.2 billion for similar activities. Enoch Mutambi, the project's skills development specialist, said that placing the facilities in public institutions keeps them accessible to women rather than primarily profit-driven. In his words, "Every woman from all walks of life within Teso can take her millet, groundnuts, cassava and other farm crops" to the Soroti University facility to add value to them.
Other officials framed it as a bridge between laboratory and market. Dr Kephas Nuwakuda, the GROW principal investigator, said NARO generates technologies that become products when they are transformed into agro products, and that the investment will create jobs. Dr Tumuhimbise Robooni, NARO's Director of Research at the National Agricultural Research Laboratories in Kawanda, and Catherine Katusiime of the Gender ministry made similar points about strengthening women's businesses through value addition.
The grant window is a different instrument aimed at a different problem. According to Nile Post, the Business Plan Competition Grant will fund at least 2,626 enterprises, including at least 767 in refugee-hosting districts. Micro enterprises can receive Shs3.5 million to Shs35.69 million, and small enterprises Shs39.259 million to Shs107.07 million. Priority goes to innovative businesses and to green and climate-resilient sectors, with agro-processing and irrigation named explicitly. Women who have already benefited from GROW loans are ineligible, applications are free and digital, the window stays open for 30 calendar days from launch, and funded projects must run for nine to 12 months and finish by June 2027.
The logic: processing beats selling raw
The case for the facilities is intuitive. Smallholder women in eastern Uganda grow crops that can be milled, roasted, pressed, dried or packaged into goods that fetch more per kilogram and keep longer. But the equipment is expensive, the power supply is uneven, and quality standards are demanding. A shared facility spreads those costs. In a New Vision interview last November, Apolot Merab, the Serere District PDM chairperson, described exactly this ambition. Women there, she said, had spent years selling cassava and maize cheaply and now wanted to move into value addition, including making their own fish feed and becoming stockists. She also urged the government to extend the programme beyond 2027, saying there should be another phase for further growth.
The climate backdrop adds urgency. Daily Monitor reported in September that prolonged dry conditions this year have hit communities from Karamoja and Teso to Greater Masaka, Bugisu and West Nile, drying dams, wilting crops and weakening livestock. A woman who can dry, mill or store her produce is less exposed to a bad season than one who must sell everything at harvest, and a facility that handles several crops gives her more than one product line to fall back on.
Lessons from an earlier attempt
The announcement also deserves some scrutiny, because the idea is not new to GROW. The project's own financial statements for the year ended 30 June 2025, published by the World Bank, show that in June 2024 Shs1.78 billion and Shs2.41 billion were sent to the Rwentaga Farm Institute and NARL Kawanda respectively for a common user production facility. The document says the World Bank then changed the implementation modality and requested a refund, to be collected in the 2025/26 financial year. It does not explain what the facility was meant to produce or why the approach changed, and it is not clear from the public record how that earlier episode relates to this week's Teso allocation.
That history is not evidence of failure; project designs are often adjusted. But it is a reminder that building facilities is the easy part. Whether they are used, who manages them, how they are paid for after the project ends, and whether women can reach them are the questions that decide whether a shared processing hub becomes a working enterprise or an idle building. Teso is a sub-region of long distances and small plots. A facility at Soroti University serves women who can get to Soroti.
Grants versus loans
The grant window adds a second layer. GROW loans are repayable and delivered through participating financial institutions. Mr Tumukunde argued that financial constraints, strict banking requirements and credit limits keep many women out of the loan system, which is why a non-repayable option exists. The eligibility rules, however, reveal trade-offs. Selection includes Credit Reference Bureau checks, and meeting requirements does not guarantee funding because applicants compete for a limited pool. Priority for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) ventures and green sectors could favour better-educated, better-connected applicants over a woman running a small groundnut-paste operation from her compound. The sheer size of the top award, over Shs107 million, is far from the typical working capital needs of a micro processor, and the 30-day window is short for rural women who must prepare a business plan and a budget digitally.
The government says it will hold business clinics to help applicants prepare proposals, and Mr Tumukunde warned the public against anyone demanding payment for forms or promising funding, an acknowledgement that fraud follows every announcement of free money. The success of the competition will depend heavily on how well those clinics reach villages, and on whether local leaders, asked to publicise the rules through radio and community meetings, do so before the window closes.
What it means for farmers and markets
If the Teso facilities work, the benefits are straightforward. Women farmers gain a way to capture more of the price of their crops, processors gain a supply of local raw material, and the region gains jobs that are not tied to the rains. The project also connects NARO's technologies, such as improved varieties and food products, to people who can commercialise them, which has long been a weak link in Uganda's research system. A processing hub that handles millet, groundnuts and cassava could also supply local school and institutional markets, which tend to pay on more predictable terms than spot traders.
There are limits. The budget is modest next to the programme's overall size; the World Bank's documents give total project cost as US$217 million. Nothing in the public statements so far gives a target number of women to be served, a timeline for commissioning the facilities, or a plan to cover running costs after GROW closes. The programme's own objective, to increase access to entrepreneurial services that enable female entrepreneurs to grow their enterprises, is broad. The test will be narrow: how many women in Teso are processing and selling a packaged product a year from now.
For now, the message to women farmers in the region is that a door has been opened. Whether it leads to a working mill or a locked building depends on the details that are still missing: who runs the facilities, what they charge, and whether the first harvests of the new season find them ready.
