Benon Sebina

Benon Sebina is overturning the top-down approach to rural development by stimulating farmers to work together to identify creative solutions that rely on local resources.

Benon believes that the prevailing approach to rural development in East Africa overlooks the real needs of subsistence farmers and results in wasted resources and potential. Farmers become reliant on cash-strapped governments and aid programs that do not work well. Benon shows subsistence farmers that they are best served by using local resources to realize dramatic increases in income, as well as the social and health benefits that accompany them. His approach prioritizes women and stimulates individuals and groups of farmers to take on income-earning initiatives–production of local feed for domesticated farm animals; use of manure to enhance soil quality; and collective efforts that increase yield significantly. The result is more productive farm animals, healthier food for rural people, and increased self-confidence in farmers who, by putting local resources and ideas to work, earn more money and realize the importance of initiative in other areas of their lives.

Nine of every 10 Ugandans live in rural areas and earn a meager income through subsistence farming. A typical family has a few chickens and cows and some land for growing food–enough for themselves and sometimes extra to swap for clothes, shoes, farming equipment.

In the past 15 years, the government and foreign donors have made sizeable investments in efforts to alleviate the poverty that often accompanies rural life. But too often such efforts fail to reach their intended goals because they do not make effective use of local resources or fully consider the environment into which they are introduced. For example, vaccines for chicken and livestock are available to farmers in some areas but only in large quantities–1,000 doses or more. Because the doses must be used within a few hours of reconstitution, they are hardly affordable, even at a subsidized cost, to a farmer with fewer than a dozen animals. This is just one of many examples that illustrate the frequent misalignment of provision to need.

Something else is going on here–perhaps less easily illustrated but just as real. Ugandans have come to believe that products and solutions from more developed countries are always best, that homegrown innovations, products, and resources are second-rate. Both development efforts and marketing campaigns promote this philosophy. Benon believes that for subsistence farmers, this mentality results in declining productivity and, equally important, erosion of confidence: rural people await prescribed solutions rather than design and pursue creative solutions using what they have.

Through the farmers' association he has formed, Benon inspires village-based efforts that encourage farmers to use local resources, teaches simple innovations that significantly increase yield and income, and works with the government (agricultural extension agents and veterinarians) and various citizen sector organizations both to achieve a shift in the approach to rural development and to encourage and enable innovation among poor farmers.

Working first in East and Central Uganda, and now nationally, Benon teaches farmers to use what they have–local animals, local grains–to realize increases in income. He has designed a curriculum that requires participating farmers to take two core courses: one in group formation, the other in chicken breeding. Instruction in other topics–jam making, forming business cooperatives, disease control, soil fertility maintenance–is optional. The curriculum is designed in 13 modules, allowing farmers to easily build skills over time, rather than all at once. Because Benon believes that farmers will value the instruction more if they pay for it, he has instituted a modest fee that goes to fund the village-level associations. For participating farmers who successfully complete the coursework, Benon–or one of the partner organizations that teaches his curriculum–offers a certificate of completion. Benon sees that convening farmers for instruction and allowing them to learn new techniques together stimulates village-based efforts and encourages initiative that reaches well beyond the adoption of new farming methods.

Benon teaches techniques that rely on local resources and have been tested and proven to work effectively in the region. For example, he invented a simple method of programmed chicken hatching that makes for healthier, more productive chickens, and increases egg production–as much as seven-fold. By synchronizing hatching so that all chicks on all neighboring farms emerge from their shells on a predetermined day of the week, cooperatives of farmers can afford doses of vaccines (available in large quantities only). Synchronization is achieved by replacing real eggs laid on any day of the week with decoy eggs, which trick the hen, keeping her on her nest. The real eggs are returned to the nest later in the week to allow exactly ten days of incubation before hatching on, say, Thursday. Farmers bring their chicks to a central location, the vaccines are reconstituted, and the newborn chicks are inoculated. The resulting birds are much healthier and disease resistant. Participating farmers form local chicken breeders' associations; they share best practices in managing the birds, feeding them, and guarding against intestinal worms and other parasites that take their toll on the birds' health. Group vaccination means more eggs, more income, more cooperation among farmers. Benon estimates that so far, about 900 farmers have used this method to double (at least) their income.

Benon has established in the districts of Mengo and Kisenyi central feed mill stores that make concentrates which are transported to rural areas to be mixed with maize and dried cassava and matooke–all abundant in rural areas of fertile Uganda. Benon shows farmers how to make balanced feeds for poultry and livestock from these locally available resources, eliminating the need to buy costly feed from Kenya. Since there are no milling centers where farmers can mill their cheap feed source, Benon aims to set up milling centers for rural areas. He has five maize hullers and five grinders to install in rural areas. One upcountry feed mill is near completion and the other four mill centers are slated for completion within a year. Profits that accrue from these mills will be plowed back into the expansion efforts of the farmer's association, which is formally registered as a not-for-profit citizen group.

Benon works closely with existing citizen groups and with government staff–particularly veterinarians and agricultural extension agents. With these groups, he maps areas of need and tracks income trends. The training modules, seminars, courses, and farm visits available to farmers are also available to citizen groups, teachers, college students, and government employees. Benon says that by seeing poor farmers innovate and implement using local resources, these other participants have begun to change their understanding and approach to rural development and recognize the wisdom of local people solving local problems.

Benon is working in parts of Kenya as well as in Uganda, and he has been contacted by groups in other neighboring countries. He plans to publish his work and curriculum on a Web site, as well as set up integrated training centers or colleges.

Benon grew up in a village in eastern Uganda. When he was a boy, his father put him in charge of the family's chickens, whose eggs he sold for meat and traded for school uniforms. Benon remembers learning from his father and other farmers that local chicks were inferior to expensive, imported birds, a notion that seemed strange to him. As a boy, he experimented with a few local birds and found that if properly cared for–dewormed and fed well–they grew up to be healthy and to produce twice as many chicks.

Later, after studying veterinary science and animal production, Benon took a job at the Ministry of Agriculture where he surveyed and researched practices in poultry and livestock feeding and breeding. This experience exposed him to practices in rural production, especially in poultry and feed production and mixing, throughout the country. He saw that reliance on imported animals was both prevalent and completely absurd. Armed with this insight and a deep understanding of rural life and farming practices, he set out on his current path, initially advertising an informal workshop on programmed chicken hatching on a local radio station.