Before the Granary Was a Statistic: Karamojong Sorghum and the Women Who Keep the Seed

Ancestral Wisdom · Sacred Plants & Spiritual Wellness · Community Power

The Women Who Keep the Granary

Achola Oliver is Karamojong Ethur. Writing in Cultural Survival Quarterly in December 2025 about Abim District and the villages of Morulem and Talabal, she names the staples of Karamojong kitchens: sorghum, millet, and beans, with groundnuts, cowpeas, wild tamarind, shea nuts, and desert dates beside them. Women, she says, have selected and saved seed across generations and were “custodians of granaries, ensuring families survived lean seasons.”

Karamojong sorghum is not an abstraction in this account. It is a seed a mother hands to a daughter. Hannah Adong, quoted by Oliver, says: “When I plant the seeds my mother gave me, I feel connected to all the women who came before me.” Elder Benon Lorika says of the young people who take up those seeds that “they carry forward not just plants, but knowledge, prayers, and memory.” That is why this post sits under Sacred Plants. A seed handed down is a prayer with roots.

Seed also moves between households. In Oliver’s account, women keep part of each harvest as seed and trade varieties in seed-sharing circles. Rose Apio explains why: “When we share seeds, we share knowledge and strength.” She adds that when one of them fails, the community makes sure no child goes hungry. Community Development Shield Uganda, which received a 2024 Keepers of the Earth Fund grant, is the organization Oliver names alongside this work. A circle is insurance no company sells. If one woman’s field fails, another woman’s seed is still in the basket.

Oliver does not romanticize the stakes. In 2023, she writes, drought shriveled one woman’s crop, and the granary was empty by July. Families faced a choice no one should have to make: “whether to cook our seeds or save them for the next planting.” That choice is not a gap in knowledge. It is what a drought does when nothing stands between a family and the dry season.

Ayugi Conny, quoted in the same piece, says what the alternative looks like: “Food sovereignty means not waiting for the truck with relief food. It means my own granary, my own millet, and my children eating food that makes them strong.” Oliver’s own hope is for communities where granaries are full year-round. In her telling, relief food is temporary survival, and the granary is the long answer. The seed is what fills it again.

What the Women Said When Someone Asked

In May and June 2018, researchers Andy Catley, Raphael Lotira Arasio, and Charles Hopkins sat with sixteen groups of agro-pastoralist women, eight in Moroto District and eight in Kotido District, and asked about hunger. Their 2023 study in Pastoralism reads like a seasonal almanac the women wrote themselves. They described two rainy periods, April–May and July–August, followed by a long dry season from November to February. They placed the peak of acute malnutrition in January, when food is scarcest.

Karamojong sorghum sits at the center of that calendar. Women said sorghum from their own fields “first became available in July/August, with increasing harvests in October with a decline through to December.” They also said the amount they produce is low, because plots are small and the work is labor-intensive, and that when the previous year’s store ran low, women were the ones obliged to find food.

Asked why children go hungry, the women prioritized two causes: declining livestock ownership, which cuts access to cow’s milk, and normalized gender discrimination, which shows up as excessive workloads and domestic violence. The authors conclude that agro-pastoralist women with limited formal education can describe and analyze the seasonality of acute malnutrition and prioritize its causes.

Read that last sentence slowly. “Limited formal education” tells you who built the measuring stick. These women did not need a credential to read their own hunger season, and they did not flinch from naming what is wrong inside their own communities. Honoring their expertise does not mean romanticizing the conditions around it. It means letting them set the terms of the problem.

The Calendar Inside the Grain

A 2013 livelihood zoning report from FEWS NET and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations lays out the farming year in Karamoja. For its Central Sorghum and Livestock zone, it lists the main food crops as sorghum, maize, millet, groundnuts, sunflower, cowpeas, and beans, and describes sorghum being broadcast and intercropped with sunflower, beans, cowpeas, and some cucurbits. The calendar it records: sowing and planting from April to June, weeding from May to July, and a harvest that begins with green consumption in August and runs until January, when long-maturing sorghum is threshed.

Set that beside what women told researchers in 2018 and the two accounts are broadly consistent: the first green heads in August, the long reckoning of the dry months, the threshing at the year’s end. The report is from 2013 and the fieldwork from 2018, and seasons shift, so read both as portraits of a rhythm, not forecasts. The rhythm is the knowledge: when to plant against uncertain rain, when the first green sorghum can feed a family, when the long-maturing crop should wait. It is taught in fields, not in manuals. The Karamojong sorghum calendar is also a labor calendar. The women in the study named excessive workloads among the forces behind malnutrition, so any plan that adds work to the sorghum season has to say whose work it adds.

Hunger inside a granary-keeping culture is rarely a knowledge problem. We argued the same about Kenya in Who Emptied the Granary?, where colonial land policy and export agriculture, not farmers’ skill, drained the store.

A UNDP and FAO project reported in December 2022 shows one way outside partners enter this picture. Running from 2018 to 2023 across Moroto, Nakapiripirit, Nabilatuk, Kaabong, Karenga, and Kotido, it reached 10,317 farmers, 54 percent of them women, through 252 Agro-Pastoral Field Schools, and communities took part in multiplying seed for an improved sorghum variety, NAROSorg 2. Improved varieties can help. The open question is whether they arrive beside the seed women already keep, or instead of it.

Eighty-Five Percent

Uganda’s own National Seed Policy, issued by the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries, says about 85 percent of seed planted comes from informal sources, mainly farm-saved seed, local markets, and social networks. Read plainly: the national seed system is mostly farmers keeping seed and trading it with neighbors. In Oliver’s account of Karamoja, much of that keeping sits in women’s hands. “Informal” is the policy’s word, and it can hide how much organization a seed system holds. A circle that decides who receives which variety is governing a commons. An inventory that counts only certified seed cannot see it.

The same policy commits the government to develop a new law that protects and preserves indigenous knowledge of local varieties and community intellectual property rights, and to build the capacity of farmer and community groups, including those led by women and youth, to conserve crop varieties with high food security value. The policy does not name sorghum, and a commitment is not yet a law that holds. Oliver’s ask is more specific: policies that “defend farmer-managed seeds, not just corporate varieties,” and legal protection for customary land systems.

We have watched what happens when knowledge held in practice meets a patent office. The neem patent fight took a decade to win, and most communities cannot mount that fight. Seed law written before a dispute is cheaper than litigation after one.

What Honoring This Knowledge Looks Like

Start with time. The women in the 2018 study described excessive workloads and labor-intensive production on small plots. A consultation scheduled in planting season costs them a day they do not have. Ask when they are free, pay for their time, and hold the meeting where they are.

Then back what already exists. A circle of women trading seed has members, norms, and a way of deciding who receives which variety. Fund the circle the women design, including the unglamorous costs of storage and gathering. Improved varieties like NAROSorg 2 can join the basket. They should not empty it.

Then protect it in law and in story. Defend farmer-managed seed before a dispute forces the question. Tell these stories only with consent, in the speaker’s own words, with her name or without it as she chooses. That is the standard our Ethical Storytelling Policy sets for us, and it is the standard any funder or journalist writing about Karamoja should meet.

World Food Day, Read Again

The theme for World Food Day on October 16 is “Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow.” FAO’s 2026 campaign page says it highlights the transformative role of innovation in addressing the challenges facing agrifood systems. Take the theme at its word. Choosing a Karamojong sorghum seed that survives a drought, saving it through a hungry season, and trading it through a circle of neighbors is innovation, with a track record measured in generations. The question for October 16 is who gets named as an innovator.

We are not writing as the people closest to this work. Achola Oliver is, and so are the women of Moroto, Kotido, and Abim who keep the seed. We are writing to point at them.

Our own Uganda gardening plan, Before the First Seed, begins with the same rule this post keeps arriving at: households decide what grows. The granary was never a statistic. It was, and is, a promise kept by women, one planting at a time.

If this reached you, it may reach someone who funds, plans, or writes about food programs. Share it with them, and ask whose expertise their next plan starts from.

I Am Because We Are. And Together, We Heal.