KATERA, UGANDA -- Katera is a village transformed. There are a handful of new houses, sturdy dwellings built of brick. There are a couple of bicycles, secondhand and battered, but fine vehicles all the same. Many of the children go to school. A half-dozen families are keeping cows.
The source of all this progress? Vanilla.
Three years ago, everyone in the village of about 25 households, 300 kilometres northeast of Kampala, grew coffee, the way almost every rural village in Uganda grows coffee. For their coffee cherries, laboriously harvested from fields of coffee trees and dried in the sun, the farmers earned 200 shillings (about 20 cents) a kilogram.
But three years ago, a handful of farmers in Katera planted vanilla; in their first harvest last year, they were paid 20,000 shillings a kilogram for the pod-like beans. This year, they have heard the price may be as high as 40,000 shillings.
"We couldn't even buy a bar of soap with the money we made from coffee," recalled Betty Walusimbi, 43. Now she and her husband have built a three-bedroom house for their seven children.
When her family relied on coffee, she could rarely pay their school fees. The children had to drop out, or miss terms; the eldest barely finished primary school. "Since we planted the vanilla, I pay at the beginning of every term," said Ms. Walusimbi, who now hopes her younger children will go to high school.
On the eve of the G8 summit, where world leaders will discuss a new plan for African development, there is much skepticism. U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has said he doesn't believe much aid money reaches the poor.
But the citizens of Katera -- so delighted with their good fortune that they dissolve into giddy laughter as they talk about vanilla prices -- tell a different story. The village's boon is due in large part to aid money. Not a multimillion-dollar World Bank project, not a huge multilateral initiative. Just $25,884 of Canadian tax dollars, channelled by the Canadian International Development Agency's Canada Fund for Local Initiatives.
For several years, the Ugandan government has encouraged farmers to get out of the coffee business. The price of coffee beans has fallen to 70 cents a kilogram from $6.50 in 1997. But converting even a small farm from coffee to vanilla requires capital -- the last thing a struggling farmer has in a village without electricity or piped water.
With the $25,884, the Canada Fund helped 30 farming households buy 100 vanilla seedlings, as well as seedlings of the kirowa plant, a succulent which serves as a trellis for the vanilla vine, and seedlings for the shade trees it needs to grow. The grant also paid for trainers to teach the farmers about organic manure, mulching and the pruning of shade trees.
And it bought the farmers wheelbarrows to carry their mulch, as well as a computer for the Uganda National Vanilla Association to keep better track of farmers and what they are growing.
In less than two years, the dividends are beginning to show. "We can do things we could never do in the past," said 26-year-old Agnes Tamale. "We bought a plot of land and we are constructing a house."
She and her husband and four children now live in a two-room, mud-walled shack, devoid of windows or furniture and roofed with mosquito-infested thatch. But she gives a tour of her home-to-be with great pleasure, showing where the "sitting room," "dining room" and bedrooms will be. The red brick house needs a floor, roof and glass in the windows, which will come with the profits of the next harvest.
"The main thing is that they have hope and security," said Jane Kisakye, the Canada Fund co-ordinator for Uganda. "They know where the money is coming from."
She believes very little of the grant was wasted, or went into the pockets of those involved; it was successful because it was not overly ambitious, it stuck to local technology and a locally understood product.
CIDA made certain stipulations. The recipient farmers must, this year, provide vanilla-vine seedlings to other farmers in their area and teach them how to grow the crop.
Development workers also noticed that women were doing much of the mulching and the labour-intensive job of hand-pollinating the vanilla vines, but men were keeping most of the profits. So CIDA built a gender stipulation into the grant: Each household that qualified had to plant two vanilla gardens, one that the husband tended and for which he got the profits, and one where the wife raised the crop and kept the earnings.
It's close to harvest season. The Uganda National Vanilla Association announces the market price on the radio, but the buyers are competitive, so the farmers in Katera may make even more than the posted rate.
Mr. Tamale hopes to harvest as much as 1,000 kilograms of vanilla from his plants. "Then we will put on a roof."
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