Uganda’s Kibaale District, bordering Lake Albert, has reason to feel hard done by. Its 4,400 square kilometres are without surfaced roads or piped water and its major towns were only last year connected to the national grid. Thus poorly resourced and with little government support, it has had to cope as best it can with influxes of refugees fleeing the perennial conflict in eastern Congo and of large numbers of migrants resettled in the district from more populous parts of the country. Predictably, levels of poverty, especially among the incomers, are high.
What the district does enjoy, however, are tracts of largely unspoilt woodland and a tradition of apiculture stretching back many generations.
At the end of 2007, a local NGO, the Emesco Development Foundation, secured funding from the States of Guernsey to promote beekeeping among the district’s most vulnerable households. Bees Abroad undertook to monitor Emesco’s activities and last March Pam Gregory and I spent three weeks in Kibaale, our aim being to see the venture properly launched along lines agreed with our Ugandan partners.
Early meetings with those in the resettlement area interested in joining the programme were encouraging. These gatherings were so well attended — by women as well as men — that we could foresee little difficulty in recruiting the 250 participants envisaged.
The villagers were immediately divided into more manageable groups, we left to devise a detailed training course and, rather to our surprise, within a couple of days the project was up and running. Since we wished to ensure Emesco staff responsible for the training employed appropriate ‘participatory’ methods, Pam and I conducted two lively sessions in basic hive management and supervised more of the same delivered later by our colleagues.
The NGO’s original — and to our mind dubious — intention had been to provide each participant with five complete top-bar hives. It soon became clear, however, that they had vastly underestimated the cost of such largesse and this presented us with the opportunity to devise a cheaper alternative that lessened the recipients’ dependence on expensive donations. In part this would be achieved by limiting later inputs to gable ends alone, instructing villagers on how to complete the hives using improvised local materials and rewarding those who did so with roofing material and a set of top bars. Since Emesco trainers would need to demonstrate the construction of such a hive, a jolly day was spent superintending their worthy efforts with eucalyptus sticks, mud and cow dung.
Important to the long-term financial viability of the project is a proposed honey marketing scheme, which would serve not only the interests of the direct beneficiaries but also those of beekeepers already existing in the area. We were able to do some useful groundwork here by, for example, familiarising the staff with a simple but entirely satisfactory method of honey-processing, designing an attractive jar label, and identifying suppliers of jars and storage buckets.
Space does not allow a complete account of our stay in Kibaale but we feel that thanks largely to the enthusiasm of our partners a good deal was accomplished in a short time. We left Emesco with a detailed timetable of targets, confident that the project was in the hands of an efficient organisation fully committed to its implementation. Only time will tell, of course, and it is to be hoped that when I return to Uganda in November I shall find our optimism was well placed.
