IRIMA PROJECT TEAM'S TRIP

The Irima Project Team left Kampala at around 8.45am on Tuesday morning on a Matatu to Nakasongola. We arrived at around 11.00am and despite the save the children staff being in a meeting were glad to be received by our sister team the Kewerimide team.

We then headed for lodges to book accommodation and to keep some of our items. We took our midday meal before meeting at Save the children offices where together with the Kewerimide team visited the NADIFA offices(Nakasongola District Farmers Association) where we had a focused group discussion with Mr Sebwato. The teams were informed of the strategies of implementing activities in the area by the experienced staff of NADIFA this include:
· The various challenges experienced by the farmers in the area.
· The projects that have been initiated in the area and succeeded and also those that failed.
· The general characters of the farmers in the area.

After the meeting the Kewerimide team left Nakasongola while the Irima Team remained and had a small discussion with Madam Prossy one of Save staff incharge of extension work.

Then team the left NADIFA offices to the Save the Children offices where they had a discussion with Madam Sarah Magoba who is in youth department and Irima’s extension worker on details about Irima youth and her experience, and details of the next day’s program. The team left Save offices in the evening. After having their dinner they had a brief meeting on the next day’s objectives.

On Wednesday morning travelled to Irima for the meeting with the youth the team. The meeting went on well and we found out that despite the vegetables the grew as a group it was not adequate enough for processing but it came to our attention that they had more of cassava in their gardens. Hence this prompted us to focuss more on cassava products.

In Irima we also noticed different activities as shown below:

The most common crop at Irima is cassava as most of the youth have atleast afew acres of cassava in their farms. It is with the adequate supply of raw materials processing we and the youth settled at producing

cassava products.

We noticed that there is some brick making in the area and we also considered this as an opportunity since we could use it to construct a traditional biomass oven and also considering the fact that the soil around the lake is sort of clay which can also enable the construction of the oven.

We also noticed ground nuts being dried in the area though not in large quantities and this led us to thinking if we could possibly use some groundnuts in the baking of cakes and cookies.

We also noticed some banana plantation at the lakeside though we did not notice other farms having the banana plantations. Hence we felt their was limited supply of bananas, and no need of processing what is of limited supply.

The people in the area also do some livestock keeping as you can see in the photos below:

As you can also see in the photos shown below, they have boats and therefore do some fishing though we were told fishing was burned. They use bicycles, boats and foot as mode of transport. Though bicycles are very common in the area.

After the meeting and some interaction with the youth we exchanged contacts we travelled back to Nakasongola as signs of rain were evident. On reaching Nakasongola we travelled back to Kampala.