Before the First Seed: Planning a Community-Led Gardening Program in Uganda

“The soil in Uganda was never empty. It was tended long before anyone arrived with a plan.”

This is the story of a garden that has not been planted yet. Ubuntu Village is planning a sustainable gardening program in Uganda, and we are writing about it before the first seed goes into the ground because the way a program begins decides whose it becomes. Zaharah, our Uganda field coordinator, carries this work on the ground, and her voice will join this page in her own words. Until then, we want to say plainly what we are building, what we have learned from those who tried before us, and the promises we are making to the households who will shape it.

The Land Was Never Empty

Start with who already feeds Uganda. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, agriculture employs over 70 percent of the population and contributed about 24 percent of national GDP in fiscal year 2023/24. The people who grow the country’s food are not a problem waiting for a solution. They are the food system.

The same country carries a hard number. The Uganda Demographic and Health Survey found that the share of children under five who are stunted fell from 29 percent in 2016 to 26 percent in 2022. That is real progress, and it is also one in four children. We do not read that figure as a verdict on families. We read it as a question about the systems around them: who controls land, seed, water, markets, and time, and who gets asked what would help.

Most program stories are written after the harvest, when the photographs are good and the ending is known. We chose to write this one first, while the plan can still change, because the honest part of any beginning is the part that has not been decided yet. A story told in advance can be corrected by the people it describes, and we would rather be corrected early than flattered late.

A garden cannot answer all of that. It can, though, be a place where some of those decisions move back into the hands of the people who live with the results. That is the only version of this program we are interested in building.

Food Sovereignty, Not Food Aid

The language we are borrowing comes from farmers. In 2007, more than 500 participants from 80 countries gathered at the International Forum on Food Sovereignty in Mali and adopted the Declaration of Nyéléni, which says that food sovereignty implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social classes, and generations.

That sentence describes what Ubuntu means in practice. I am because we are is not a slogan about generosity flowing in one direction. It is a claim about relationship: a garden belongs to the people who tend it, and the knowledge in it belongs to the people who carried it. When we say food sovereignty, we mean that households decide what grows, who tends it, who eats first, and what is saved for next season. We do not mean a distribution of vegetables handed across a fence. It also means that where our assumptions and their knowledge disagree, we begin by asking, and we expect to be taught.

What Ubuntu Asks of a Garden

Ubuntu is often summarized as I am because we are, but the sentence is easy to say and hard to practice. In a garden it becomes concrete very quickly. Soil does not respond to good intentions. It responds to attention, to patience, and to many hands working in sequence: someone who prepares the ground, someone who watches the weather, someone who remembers which seed does well in which corner, someone who carries water, and someone who knows when it is time to harvest and share.

A garden is a practice of mutual dependence, which is why it makes such a good teacher for the kind of community we want to be part of. Nobody grows alone. Nobody eats a harvest that belongs to one person only. The work asks us to trust that what we plant will be tended by others when we cannot be there, and that what we receive was shaped by hands we may never meet.

That is the ancestral understanding we are trying to honor here: land is a relationship, not a resource, and a community that tends its land together is also tending itself. We hold that as a teaching from the traditions we learn from, not as something we discovered, and not as a program feature. It is the reason we want the work to move at the speed of trust.

What the Evidence Asks of Us

We would be doing this poorly if we only told you the hopeful parts. Three randomized controlled trials published in Food Policy in 2021 followed 1,255 households in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda that were offered home garden support. In Tanzania, the share of households producing vegetables rose by 20 percent. In Kenya and Uganda, the researchers found no significant effects on production, and across all three countries no significant effects on diets.

The authors offered two explanations that we take seriously. Many of the participating households were already producing vegetables, which left little room for a program to add anything. And participation in the training events was low. Their conclusion was that the field needs a better understanding of the barriers, along with more careful design, local adaptation, and targeting.

We read that as instruction, not discouragement. It tells us that a gardening program is not automatically good because gardens are good. It tells us to begin by learning what households already grow and already know, to shape any training around people’s actual time rather than ours, and to be honest, in public, about what works and what does not.

A garden planned with a community starts with listening. Your support helps Ubuntu Village stay at that pace in Uganda, with households leading and us following.

Crops With Ancestors

What goes into the ground matters as much as how the program is run. Across Uganda, indigenous vegetables such as nakati have fed families for generations. A 2023 Makerere University study examined three nakati varieties from central Uganda and analyzed their content of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, iron, zinc, and calcium, concluding that these plants are important nutrient sources that could help address nutritional deficiencies through greater production and consumption.

We cite that research with care. A laboratory finding is not a plan, and we are not arriving with a fixed crop list. The seedlings we are planning, amaranth (dodo), nakati, and African spider plant (enswiga), are crops that households already know, and each family will choose which of them to start. The same goes for every seed. Part of what is inherited in a garden is the seed itself, along with the knowing of when to plant it, how to save it, and what it is for. Our job is to protect that inheritance, not to improve it from the outside.

Where the Plan Stands

As of our September 2026 newsletter, this program is still in planning. We are sourcing gallon bags of soil to start seedlings for fifty partner families, up from the ten we first described in August. The seedlings are indigenous crops that Ugandan families have grown and eaten for generations: amaranth (dodo), nakati, and African spider plant (enswiga). Each family will also receive a bag of food staples (rice, beans, maize flour, and cooking oil) bought at the prices their neighbors pay.

In an upcoming planting season, we expect soil, seedlings, and food bags to reach the first of the fifty families. We are naming all of this before it launches because accountability means telling you what is coming, not only what is finished. We will update this section as the plan moves.

How We Are Holding the Plan

Before any ground is broken, these are the commitments we are making, and we invite the households we work with to hold us to them.

Households decide what grows and where. Zaharah’s first work is to listen, and the plan is built from what she hears rather than the other way around. We start from what people already grow, so that the program adds to their knowledge instead of repeating it. Seeds and the knowledge that comes with them stay with the households that hold them.

A plan written in another country can only ever be a draft. Where the decisions of the households differ from ours, theirs prevail. We will update this page as the plan changes and note the date of each revision at the top, so that anyone who read an earlier version can see what shifted and why.

Stories and photographs are shared only with clear consent, under our Ethical Storytelling Policy. And we will report back honestly, including what does not work, the same way the researchers above did. When gardeners and Zaharah are ready to speak for themselves, their own words will appear on this page, unedited in meaning and unclaimed by us.

What Success Will and Will Not Mean

Programs are usually judged by what an outsider can photograph. We would rather be judged by what households can tell us. If this garden works, it will be because gardeners say it gave them more control over what their families eat, more choice about what they plant, and more seed in their own hands at the end of the season. Those are the measures we intend to ask about first.

We also intend to look at the harder questions the research raises. Did households grow more vegetables than they did before, or were they already growing plenty? Did meals actually change? Who came to the gatherings, who did not, and what would have made it possible for them to come? We would rather learn that something is not working in the first season than discover it in a report years later.

This is the same philosophy behind how we count in all our work, which we describe in Counting What Counts: the people closest to the work decide what counts as progress. We will share what we learn here, including what falls short, because a community that is trusted with the truth can help correct the course.

The Soil Remembers. The Work Continues.

Your partnership helps Ubuntu Village plan and sustain community-led gardening in Uganda, with the households who live there deciding what grows.

Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine. Read more about Michele, or connect with her on LinkedIn.