Client orientation of agricultural research in Uganda: the Namulonge experience

Abstract

In the 1960’s andl970’s research in Uganda and other developing countries was top down approach where the technology was developed on research stations by researchers and then turned over to extension for demonstration and diffusion to farmers. Farmers were not consulted on what type of technologies were suited to their systems. Hence there was a catch-phrase in agricultural development i.e “yield gap”. Farmers could not attain yield comparable to those at experiment stations. Therefore due to those problems an important trend in the last decade has been increasing attention paid to the client i.e client orientation. The gap now is between the research-clients.

There is therefore need to close this gap i.e researcher-client gap. It has been shown that to be successful agricultural research has to respond to demand for assistance in solving agricultural problems. This paper presents how Namulonge Agricultural and Animal Production Research Institute (NAAR1) through its different research programmes has addressed the gap between researchers and the clients. It is the experiences through this work that is presented in form of case studies.