Research
Mak-RIF Round 5, Track 2: PhD Research Grants 2023/2024 Request For Applications
Agriculture & Environment
What two weeks with Farmers in Mwera, Mityana, taught Makerere’s PhD Students about Agricultural Innovation
From walking through farms and tracing agricultural histories to listening to farmers and engaging communities in dialogue, a two-week field course in Mityana District offered Makerere University doctoral students a profound lesson: meaningful agricultural innovation begins with the people it seeks to serve.
When the classroom moved to Mwera, Mityana
For two weeks, the classroom had no walls. Its lessons were written across coffee and banana gardens, cultivated fields, homesteads and the lived experiences of farming communities in Mityana District. From 4 to 16 October 2026, Mwera Parish and the surrounding villages of Kiwande, Kakindu, Kitiddibuli, Bananze and Kireku became an extended classroom for six doctoral students pursuing a PhD in Agricultural and Rural Innovation under Makerere University‘s Department of Extension and Innovation Studies.
The students were undertaking a field course in Action Research in Agri-food Systems, Innovations and Livelihoods, an academic exercise designed to take learning beyond the university and into the communities whose agricultural realities are often the subject of research, policy and development interventions.
Here, there were no neatly arranged lecture halls or powerpoint presentations to explain every agricultural challenge. Instead, there were landscapes to interpret, farmers with stories to tell, and agricultural practices shaped by generations of experience, adaptation and survival.
Under the guidance of Dr. Richard Miiro, Dr. Sarah Akello and Dr. Moses Okech, the students set out to understand farming systems not simply as combinations of crops and livestock, but as complex relationships between people, natural resources, institutions, markets and livelihoods.
What began as an academic exercise would gradually become something more profound. An encounter with the realities of rural life and a reconsideration of what it truly means to support agricultural innovation.
Reading the landscape, listening to farmers
The first lessons came from the landscape itself. Moving through Mwera, Kakindu, Bananze, Kitiddibuli and neighbouring communities, the students conducted transect walks, observed cropping patterns, examined agroecological conditions and interacted with farming households.
Everywhere they looked, the landscape offered clues about how people made a living.
Coffee and banana gardens stood alongside seasonal crops, livestock enterprises and settlements. The arrangement of farms, the crops under cultivation and the resources available to households reflected decisions shaped by soil conditions, land availability, household resources and market opportunities.
Yet, as the students soon discovered, what was visible on the land told only part of the story. Why did neighbouring households practise agriculture differently, even when they appeared to share similar conditions? How had farming systems changed over time? What influenced farmers’ decisions, and what challenges continued to threaten their livelihoods?
To answer these questions, the students had to do more than observe. They had to listen. Through interviews, historical inquiries and participatory discussions, farmers shared experiences that offered explanations beyond what could be seen in their fields.
Their accounts revealed that agricultural decisions are not always driven by the desire to maximise yields or profits. Sometimes, a farmer’s choice reflects the immediate needs of a household, limited financial resources, available labour, uncertainty about markets, the need to manage risks or lessons accumulated over years of experience. A farming practice that might appear inefficient to an outsider could, when understood through the farmer’s circumstances, represent a deliberate and practical response to uncertainty.
For the doctoral students, these encounters challenged a conventional assumption about agricultural extension, that experts possess knowledge which must simply be transferred to farmers.
The farmers of Mwera were far from passive recipients of information. They were knowledgeable actors, continuously observing, experimenting, adjusting and making decisions within the opportunities and limitations of their circumstances. It became increasingly clear that effective agricultural extension cannot begin with prescribing solutions. It must begin with understanding the people expected to use them.
Understanding the farming system
As the days progressed, the students began connecting what they had observed in the fields with what they were learning from the farmers. They examined the area’s agrarian history, farming practices, resource use and livelihood strategies, seeking to understand not only how agriculture was being practised, but also why farming systems had evolved in particular ways.
Historical accounts helped explain changes in land use, agricultural production and livelihoods. Observations of the landscape revealed differences in farming opportunities, while conversations with households illuminated the social and economic circumstances influencing agricultural decisions.
Therefore, addressing one problem without understanding its relationship to others can result in interventions that appear technically sound but are difficult for farmers to adopt or sustain. The field experience also challenged the tendency to associate agricultural innovation exclusively with new technologies, improved seeds, machinery or modern production techniques.
Innovation, the students learned, can also emerge from changes in how farmers organise themselves, share knowledge, access information, manage resources, respond to risks or collaborate with institutions. Sometimes, the most consequential innovation is not a new technology introduced onto a farm, but a new relationship, an improved way of working together or a better understanding of an existing challenge.
For students, these insights were particularly significant. They reinforced the importance of understanding the wider social, economic and institutional environment within which agricultural decisions are made. They also demonstrated why successful interventions must be relevant to farmers’ circumstances, inclusive of different farming households and sustainable beyond the period of external support.
When researchers returned to the community
After nearly two weeks of walking through farms, observing agricultural practices, conducting interviews and analysing findings, the students returned to the people who had made their learning possible. This time, however, they were not coming to ask questions. They were coming to share what they had learned and, importantly, to find out whether the community agreed with their interpretations.
At Mwera Community Hall, more than 60 community members gathered for a feedback session, among them were farmers who had participated in the fieldwork and shared their experiences with the students. It was a defining moment in the field course.
The students presented their findings on the landscape, agricultural history, farming practices, livelihood strategies and the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats identified within the farming systems. But the meeting was not intended to be a one-way presentation of academic findings. Community members were invited to validate the observations, question the interpretations, identify gaps and contribute their own perspectives on the challenges facing agriculture in the area.
The discussions brought familiar concerns to the forefront; declining soil fertility, the rising cost of agricultural inputs, crop suitability, pests and diseases, and access to agricultural services.
Through a participatory prioritisation exercise, pests and diseases emerged as the farmers’ leading concern, followed by limited access to farmer advisory services.
The significance of this outcome went beyond identifying two agricultural challenges. It demonstrated why communities must be involved not only in providing information for research, but also in interpreting findings and determining which problems deserve priority attention. For researchers, a challenge may appear important because of its technical or economic implications. For farmers, its urgency may be shaped by daily experiences, the risks it presents to household livelihoods and their ability to respond.
The feedback session therefore became more than the conclusion of a field course. It was an opportunity for the students to subject their academic interpretations to the knowledge and judgement of the people whose lives those interpretations sought to explain.
In that exchange lay an important distinction between conducting research on communities and conducting research with them. The farmers were not merely sources of data. They were contributors to knowledge generation, participants in validating findings and partners in identifying the challenges that mattered most to them. Yet, even as the discussions drew to a close, a larger question remained: What happens after researchers leave?
Rethinking agricultural extension and innovation
The experience in Mwera offered lessons extending well beyond the requirements of a doctoral field course. For agricultural extension professionals, it raised fundamental questions about how farmers are understood, how agricultural problems are diagnosed and how interventions are designed.
The first lesson was the importance of diagnosis before prescription.
Agricultural interventions cannot be adequately designed without understanding the landscape, its history, the diversity of farming households and the social, economic and institutional relationships that influence their decisions. What works for one farmer may not necessarily work for another, even within the same community. Differences in land ownership, labour availability, financial resources, farming objectives and exposure to risk can significantly influence the suitability of an intervention.
The second lesson concerned the place of farmers in knowledge creation.
Scientific research remains essential to agricultural development, but farmers also possess valuable knowledge acquired through experience, observation and adaptation. Bringing these forms of knowledge together creates opportunities for solutions that are both scientifically informed and grounded in local realities.
The third lesson was that agricultural innovation is rarely the achievement of a single actor.
Farmers, researchers, extension workers, government institutions, markets and other development actors all influence how knowledge is generated, shared and translated into practice. Innovation therefore requires collaboration, coordination and relationships that enable different actors to learn from one another and respond to shared challenges.
Taken together, these lessons challenge agricultural extension professionals to move beyond their traditional role as transmitters of technical knowledge and become facilitators of learning, collaboration and innovation.
They also challenge universities to reflect on the meaning of research impact.
Should the success of agricultural research be measured only by the volume of data collected, academic reports completed and publications produced? Or should it also be assessed by the extent to which research strengthens communities’ capacity to understand and address their own challenges? For institutions such as Makerere University, whose teaching and research are closely connected to national development priorities, this question is particularly relevant. Field-based learning offers an opportunity to connect academic inquiry with the realities of the communities that research ultimately seeks to serve. It also reminds researchers that meaningful engagement requires more than arriving in a community, collecting information and departing with findings. It calls for listening, mutual learning, respect for local knowledge and a willingness to recognise farmers as partners in the search for solutions.
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