Mushroom for mushrooming livelihoods is yet
another project being incubated under the East Africa Resilience Innovationlab. This project was selected for the Resilience Innovation Challenge forAdverse Climate Effects (RIC4ACE) for support in the East Africa Resilience
Innovation Lab after realising that easy access to mushroom growing will expand
the potential for diversification to this high value crop among organic farmers
in rural Africa. It will also provide a platform for changing practices
regarding farming on small holding.
The team got to know about this challenge
through their group leader Mr. Kyeyune who works with Makerere UniversityCollege of Agriculture and Environmental Science, Department of Agricultural
Production. Mr. Kyeyune saw the RIC4ACE advert on the Makerere University intranet
and they there thought it wise to join this competition.
Mushrooms are some of the crops that have
been taken on under modern farming in a bid to alleviate poverty and improve
livelihood of Ugandans. This has seen many farmers adopt mushrooms farming which
has led to scarcity of residues used in growing.
As a solution to this Kyeyune Gerald
Lwanga, Steven Katende Serunjogi, Muhereza Begumisa David, Mbowa Elly, Kigonya
Allan and Mivule Dan came up with this innovation. This innovation seeks to
introduce a substitute for growing mushrooms where farmers will shift from
cotton husks to crop residue.
The team states that this new approach will
help in reducing deforestation rates since farmers will now use cold
sterilisation approach like detergents to sterilise the substitutes other than
the fire wood they initially used.
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This project can be established on small
chunk of land and this in turn will help farmers in areas like Wakiswa who have
no large chunks of land to earn, it will also help those in urban areas like
Kampala who have lost their jobs to KCCA to get something to do. It will also
enable farmers to earn in a short period since the production cycle of the mush
room is only two weeks.
The mushroom can be grown in door in
polythene bags where one can harvest four times in a period of two months. The
production cycle can be planned and the farmers can therefore harvest every day.
This will help in diversifying the income of farmers rather than relying on
cash crops that are vulnerable to disease and have no stable prices. These
other crops also depend on rain and any change in season may affect them which
is not the case with mushrooms.
Besides ResilientAfrica Network, this
wonderful team of innovators are also working with the Farmers Organisation.
With help from this organisation they believe they will be able to identify the
farmers they are to work with and train them how to grow the mushrooms. They
will also be able to identify the markets for the products. The farmers will
also be linked to service providers and opportunities that will help in
commercialising mushrooms.
The project will enable farmers to acquire
good mushroom seeds from a trustworthy source and organisations such as NAADS
will also have a certified source of seeds.
The team looks at the award worth 45,000
USD they got from RIC4ACE as their biggest achievement. They also managed to
refine their innovation and make it acceptable to the USAID.
As with any new innovation, this brilliant
team mentions the process they used to refine the innovation such as carrying
out need finding and prototyping as one of the challenges they have faced.
“Some of the processes we used in refining
our project were hard. We had never used it before and it therefore took long
for us to adapt to the new system, “noted Mr. Kyeyune.
The team also pointed out the process has
been time consuming and long. This process began in October 2014 and it has not
yet ended.
The team believes that in the next three
years there will be a bigger market for mushroom products such as fresh
mushroom, dried mushroom, mush room soup, wine, tea, biscuit, pizza and many
others. The mushroom industry will also be bigger than it is now.
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