CHAPTER 12
The story of the health coordinating committee, KUFSALCC and the urban agriculture ordinances
Diana Lee-Smith • Semwanga Margaret Azuba • John Muwanga Musisi • Maria Kaweesa • George W. Nasinyama
THE STORY OF THE HEALTH COORDINATING COMMITTEE, KUFSALCC AND THE URBAN AGRICULTURE ORDINANCES
219 CHAPTER X I I
HOW URBAN AGRICULTURE IN KAMPALA LED TO INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION Despite its recent history of civil war and conflict, Kampala, among its neighbor cities in the region, is fortunate in having a national constitution and decentralization policy that favor a participatory approach to governance. It is also fortunate in having a suitable environment and a rich history of urban development that incorporates agriculture, with the ancient Kingdom of Buganda having its capital located in the city. The traditional pattern of urban settlement, uphill meaning high status and downhill being the place of the poor, with farming on the slopes and in the valleys, still shows in current patterns of both urban and peri-urban farming (David et al. forthcoming; Calas 1998, pp. 273 – 289). Due to the widespread practice of urban agriculture, there was no severe malnutrition observed in Kampala during the 1980s civil war and the structural adjustment policies of the 1990s. Nonetheless, as in other sub-Saharan African states, the urban institutional environment has not been particularly supportive of urban agriculture, with no official policy recognition, the exception being Kampala’s Structure Plan of 1994 (Van Nostrand et al. 1994). Despite the existence of this document, there has been widespread resistance to its implementation in practice. This is not to say that there was nothing going on in the policy environment. Just as researchers engaged stakeholders in research and health impact assessment, so others engaged researchers in the process of changing policy and legislation on urban agriculture, all attempting to bring together the sometimes competing and even conflicting interests involved. As explained in the introduction in Chapter 1, and developed further in Chapter 4, this book views urban agriculture from an urban governance perspective, its management being based on interaction between civil society and the state (McCarney 2003, p. 36). A recent study of how the City Ordinances on urban agriculture came about concluded that a number of factors converged to make this innovation possible, namely the farmers themselves, civil society action, influential research and key decentralization policies and actions. The main factor however was seen as the motivation, coordination and collaboration of a set of actors from different institutions (Hooton et al. 2007). Here we tell the story of how