Eradicating poverty is not a task of charity, it’s an act of justice and the key to unlocking an enormous human potential. Still, nearly half of the population lives in poverty, together, we can feed the hungry, wipe out disease and give everyone in the world a chance to prosper and live a productive and rich life. GPSU is implementing a number of projects towards helping the poor get out of poverty in Uganda.
Income Generating Activities
GPSU is supporting families to engage in income generating activities to improve their incomes in families for self-sustainability. We are supporting families with basic knowledge in business selection, business management skills, seed capital and mentorship.
Skills Development for Youth, Women and PWDs
Uganda’s labour force consists of 15 million individuals with Agriculture accounting for 73% of the labour force employed. About 95 percent of the 11 million people working in Agriculture are informal workers. Within the services sector, 80 percent of the jobs are in the non-wage/informal sector jobs, mainly in low-productivity retail trade. Other sectors that employ relatively large numbers include the manufacturing sector (500,000 people) with about 60% of these in non-wage manufacturing. Construction accounts for 1.6 percent of the workforce (about 250,000 people). However, over 90 percent of workers are in wage employment sector.
The challenge Uganda faces is to increase the number of jobs in the more productive sectors, shifting people out of Agriculture into services and industry, while at the same time putting in place interventions, which will enhance productivity in Agriculture.
Therefore, GPSU has embarked skills development for youth, PWDs and the unemployed graduates to acquire employable skills and to increase productivity. This is through practical skills training.
Building Agribusiness Development Project
Under this intervention areas, focus is mainly on building strong and sustainable agribusiness models among the target community to facilitate the transition from subsistence farming to commercial production. our value chain approach that is focused on coffee, honey, maize, beans, coffee, and pepper value chains, GPSU has built knowledge and expertise of farmers in the use of improved technologies and management practices, strengthen quality of produce through promotion of post harvesting technologies, and value addition. GPSU has also facilitated improved farmer-private sector collaborations in areas of production, marketing, and value addition through creating linkages and partnerships with traders, dealers, and input suppliers. More efforts have been put on enhancing farmers’ access to appropriate and relevant market information, value addition and marketing innovations, access to rural credit input supply services and crop financing facilities.
Entrepreneurship Development Project
Despite being ranked the world’s most entrepreneurial country, few Ugandan businesses hit the big time. GPSU offers business mentorship and business development services to small businesses in rural and slum areas.
Community Saving Initiatives
The project focuses on the large portion of the rural population that has little or no access to financial services and on two rural institutions that have successfully demonstrated that sound and appropriate financial services can be provided to even the poorest members of rural communities namely, Savings and Credit Cooperatives (SACCOs) and Community Savings and Credit Groups (CSCGs).
