Help Anthony Fight Extreme Poverty in Rural Uganda

Meet Anthony Kalulu, a remarkable farmer who lives in rural Eastern Uganda.

Anthony is very motivated to improve life for the local farmers, and he is doing his best in an area with extremely limited resources. I first found out about him through a viral Guardian article he published a while ago where he detailed the extreme poverty in his hometown and how top-down approaches to alleviate poverty hadn’t worked.

Until several years ago, Anthony often went days without food and people in his village still experience this today. Anthony is college-educated and worked as a math and science teacher from 2003-2011, but he lacked a reliable source of food with his meager wages. This led him to found the Uganda Community Farm (UCF) about a decade ago in his hometown to improve the economic situation there.

Almost everyone in his hometown are farmers who currently struggle to have cash-flow due to the lack of infrastructure to sell their farm produce. Because they make almost no money, they cannot buy equipment like fertilizer, bicycles, or farming tools to improve their earning potential - perpetuating a cycle of poverty.

UCF works with a distant brewery in the capital of Uganda which sells high-quality sorghum seeds and buys back the harvested crop. Sorghum is a grain that grows well in hot, dry climates and requires less water, making it ideal for the Ugandan environment. UCF provides these seeds at no cost to local farmers, buys back the harvest, and transports it to the brewery. With even a small cash-flow, the farmers can buy items such as soap or salt, and look forward to the next harvest 6 months later.

Anthony’s long-term plan to ensure self-sufficiency is to take a profit margin when the organization grows larger. Currently, UCF relies solely on donations and it struggles to cover costs for the farmers it supports: growing from 30 farmers in 2022 for the first planting after the pandemic to 70 farmers now in 2024.

The current goal is ambitious but crucial: raise $5,000 by April 1 to cover half of UCF’s costs through the next bi-annual planting season (starting in mid March and ending in August) to avoid cutting into the organization’s dwindling savings account. Operating on a tight budget, this amount covers half of the monthly expenses of 5 employee salaries, fuel, and supplies for the farmers.

Here’s where you can make a difference:

$10: provide sorghum seed for 1 acre (each farmer plants between ¼ and 2 acres of Sorghum)

$40: a large 30 ft square tarp for post harvest handling

$100: one employee’s monthly salary

$250: one month’s fuel for UCF’s motorbike for farm visits and training, and for the occasional use of their dump truck

After communicating with Anthony and donating to the UCF for a year and half, I have seen that he is an incredibly hardworking and resilient person. Anthony has persevered for 10 years and through numerous obstacles including the pandemic. Your contribution can make a huge impact on Anthony & UCF’s goal of reducing extreme poverty in their region in a long lasting way.

We are often bombarded with donation requests, but I think that the Ugandan Community Farm is rather unique in its grass-roots structure with a deep knowledge of local needs, a clear short-term plan in need of donation support, an opportunity for long-term self-sufficiency, and an important mission to address the pressing problem of extreme poverty.

This is an incredible opportunity to improve many family’s lives. Please don’t feel like any amount is too small. If you want more details on how the money is helping, Anthony posts updates on the UCF website. In addition, please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Steve

Note: Due to GoFundMe restrictions on international payments, the funds will be transferred to my Bank of America checking account and I will use Remitly or an international wire (whichever is cheaper at the time) to send an international payment to Anthony in Ugandan Shillings (UGX). If you wish to send money to Anthony directly yourself via an international payment service, please see the bank details at https://www.ugandafarm.org/support-us/.

Note: UCF is registered with Benevity, which enables employer-matched charitable donations if your company uses Benevity (including Google, Visa, John Deere, UPS).

Note: GoFundMe charges a 2.9% + $0.30 fee for each donation but allows donation with credit cards, so you can get much of that back (e.g., CITI Double Cash gives 2% cash back, for example).