| Sumario: | Since 2012, CGIAR and its partners have collaborated with value chain actors and stakeholders in Uganda's pork value chain to address the constraints and opportunities in the sector. Demand for pork in Uganda is the highest in the Eastern Africa region estimated at 3.4 kg per capita per annum. Fueled by the rising demand for pork, Uganda's pig population increased significantly from 3.2 million in 2008 to 7.1 million in 2021, a growth exceeding 100% (Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2024). Whilst, in 2012, the pig sector was largely 'invisible' to decision-makers and investors, the joint work of CGIAR and partners resulted in a noticeable increase in knowledge, awareness and action within the industry. For example, pork is now recognized within the meat category prioritized in the agro-industrialization program of the 4th National Development Plan.
Despite the importance of pig keeping, which is a key source of livelihood to more than 2.2 million smallholder farmers, the sector faces many challenges. Due to less-than-optimal practices in feeding, herd health, choice of breeds and biosecurity, pig productivity remains low (Ouma et al. 2015; Marshall et al. 2023). African swine fever is a persistent threat, leading to high pig mortalities and significant economic loss (Dione et al. 2017; Ouma et al. 2018). Additionally, pigs are highly sensitive to heat stress, which is of particular concern in regions experiencing rising temperatures (Zaake, 2018). Access to inputs specifically high-quality feeds, and services such as extension remains weak, further hindering productivity (Lukuyu et al. 2017). Untransparent pig pricing mechanisms due to lack of standards for pork and its products, coupled with poor value chain coordination disincentivizes producers, especially women, who often lack negotiating power for pig prices.
A decade’s worth of research (2012–25) is helping pig producers address some of the issues, but smallholder producers still face challenges of low pig productivity, along with disease and climate risks. This is largely because the challenges are systemic, involving complex dynamic, and interconnected social, political, and economic factors, including deep-rooted structural and behavioral barriers that need to be unlocked (Businge et al. 2025). The challenges are often interlinked, through complex relationships and feedback loops where one challenge can cause or exacerbate another across different areas. This requires systems’ thinking methodologies to unravel such interlinkages and root causes of the constraints to inform the co-designing and implementation of relevant scalable solutions to unlock the bottlenecks. We held market systems analysis workshops with pig market actors from the Buganda sub-region in Central region (Masaka, Mukono, Wakiso and Mpigi districts) in May 2025 to identify the pig system blockages and assess its root causes, including constraints identified from value chain and diagnostic studies implemented by CGIAR in 2012 such as Ouma et al. (2017) and Dione et al. (2014). We utilized causal loop diagrams to show the interactions of the constraints its root causes.
|
|---|