Charity begins at home; Hoima NAADS Coordinator lives by example
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| Dr Scola in her poultry house |
Dr. Scola Bwali, the Hoima District NAADS Coordinator, believes in the old
adage charity begins at home. After years of field extension as a veterinary
expert, Dr. Bwali finally decided to practice what she preached. She turned
her house into a demonstration site for poultry rearing and tree seedling nursery.
“This used to be a pool house. I bought it from government as a sitting
tenant and decided to turn it into a demonstration site for our farmers. Being
a veterinary doctor by profession, I thought it important to use my knowledge
not just to teach people about improved agricultural production, but to demonstrate
to them that it works if you apply the right skills and access the right information,”
she says. “We need to lead by example, if we are to talk about issues
and technologies that work. NAADS has been putting in a lot of money in advisory
services, but there are people who still don’t believe that you can actually
transform if you have the right information. I am trying to show that even in
a small plot you can generate more than fifty million. That is what I generate
here,” she said.
According to Dr. Bwali, whose district is one of the highest rice and maize
producers, having other enterprises alongside the traditional food crops would
greatly boost household incomes. “I found that as a civil servant the
income was not enough for my needs. So other than waiting for salary at the
end of the month, I decided to experiment with layer and broiler chicks for
a daily and steady income,” Dr. Scola said.
Dr. Bwali imported the broiler parent stock from Mauritius and the layers from
Hendrix Generics from the Netherlands. Layers costs are 4.5 Euros each plus
transportation costs of 0.6 Euros per chicken from Netherlands to Entebbe, as
well as URA taxes. Her poultry farm is the first of its kind in Hoima. Farmers
traditionally had to travel to Kampala to buy chicks from UgaChick, Biyinzika
or other suppliers. But being a technically competent veterinarian, Dr. Bwali
felt she was well placed to bring such services nearer to the people.
Dr. Bwali mainly runs two enterprises – the poultry farm and a nursery
garden established at the back of her house. Pine tree seedlings, Askareba from
Brazil and Australia, are her main crop and the most profitable but she also
propagates coffee seedlings. From this poultry enterprise, Dr. Bwali earns 1.6m
shillings per week. The poultry farm produces 400 layer chicks weekly, which
she sells for sh2,000 each and approximately 700-900 broiler chicks at sh1,200
each. Off-layer chicken sales provide approximately sh100,000 per week, which
in turn buys feed for the poultry.
“The 1.5m shillings I get from broiler and layer chicks per week is the
net profit,” she says. “Unfortunately in Uganda, our research is
not at that level of producing parent stock, so you have to import from abroad.”
One kilo of quality seedlings from the Namanve tree seedlings centre, under
the National Forestry Authority, costs sh950,000 which contains approximately
15,000 seedlings. Each seedling at farm gate prices costs 400 shillings enabling
Dr. Bwali to earn sh6m per kilogram. Dr. Bwali now uses her demonstration plot
for training the local farmers on best practices in poultry rearing and how
they can use the chicken droppings for quality nursery beds that produce improved
seedlings. She has also cut farmers costs in procurement of poultry by supplying
the local community with layers and broilers at reasonable prices after on-site
training. This kind of approach, which directly shows farmers the benefits of
improved poultry production, is in her view the best means of improving farming
production.
