Our solution is modern agriculture. The fact that Refugees have less access to most resources in the host countries due to their status and less capacities, it has become very hard for them to engage into most of the developmental and economic activities apart from small-scale subsistence agriculture and small scale businesses . Therefore A HAND FOR A REFUGEE came to train and empower refugees with modern agricultural skills, new techniques and diversifying agriculture for their well-being. This include planting crops with competing prices on the market.
Such crops like fruits such as passion fruits as our main focus, vegetables like cabbages, tomatoes, onions among others. These crops can be grown on the small pieces of land available for refugees.
According to our research, the above crops can rise refugee income by 60% if well-planned with modern and efficient techniques. These agricultural practices being easy to implement we expect many parents to freely let their children go to school and more youth to engage as they attend schools regularly as required since 72% of school dropouts in kyangwali claim to lack scholastics, school fees and helping parents to dig looking for food and welfare. As we continue to encourage such agricultural practice it will grant us an opportunity to sensitize saving of the finance got in various groups and advocating for the education of the refugee child.

Why agriculture?

We thought that since 90% of refugees in various camps and settlements participate in agriculture of different kinds and is the major means of survival, empowering such people with skills and knowledge to modernize this activity by introducing of new crops like passion fruits Mushrooms, and fish and rabbits farming with modern improved skills would be the best way to go

The passion fruit is our main concern is a crop that is easily managed, it is not much affected by diseases and pests and can easily adapt to different climates or weather changes since it has got various spices. In bringing income to a farmer is our major goal it has over 90% returns if cared for and has given good outcomes that a small scale or starting farmer with land a refugee has in the camp can earn over 2(two) million Uganda shillings, in 6 months. Compared to the subsistence maize and beans where they can earn a maximum of 200000 shillings. This is estimated to be about 333,000 earnings per month from passion fruits while about 33000 per month is earned from maize.
This clearly shows a very promising improvement since we have practiced practical research on this particular fruit in kyangwali refugee settlement to ensure reduced risks in what we are doing and to act as an experimental farm to the rest of the farmers involved in our four-acre piece of land in Kilima zone A. More promising is that the REFUGEE WELFARE COUNSEL of Kyangwali got interested and has rendered us support in activities like recommendations like when we were getting land from the Office of the Prime minister.

Approach and what make us unique

We recruit farmers freely per season, and provide modern agriculture skills through our different capacity-building sessions which include theory and practical including vegetable growing, passion fruits growing, and other agriculture-generating activities like fish farming, and rabbit keeping among others which take place at our experimental farm, theoretical topics include human rights financial literacy which also contributes to social-economic stability. These farmers are later supported to start their farms with seedlings, chemicals, and pesticides to protect their crops and other requirements to ensure their farms are successful, all received in their small subgroups.

Upon the harvesting time, we collect our products and sell them as an association to ensure advantages of large-scale selling like good prices and reducing post-harvest losses which are big problems. We become unique since we ensure a sustainable source of refugee income.