The Potential of School Gardening to Mitigate Short-term Hunger among Universal Primary Schools in Kamuli District, Eastern Uganda

This paper reports on a Field Attachment Program Award (FAPA), an internship undertaken by the first author to report back to the communities where the MSc thesis research was done, and come up with ideas to scale up the Masters’ research outputs. The Masters’ research was on the “Effects of Short- Term Hunger on Schooling among Universal Primary Schools in Kamuli and Soroti Districts”. The research established that 59% of the pupils go without food and therefore drop out of school because of hunger. Following the establishment of school gardens under this project which was run by the pupils themselves, the pupils did not only engage themselves in gardening which supplied food to the school, but school gardening enhanced their attendance and retention in school, got them interested in farming, and they begun taking the information around the villages; they thus became ‘local village extension agents’. The internship provided opportunity to scale up the activities that were done in one school to four more schools, and to the district at large, which is further scaling them up. This internship was carried out with the Volunteer Efforts for Development Concerns (VEDCO), a local nongovernmental organisation, which is now scaling up and out the school gardening project.