WESTERN UGANDA – Before Senior Presidential Advisor Peace Rugambwa, agriculture in Western Uganda was marked by losses and broken markets. In Kabale, Irish potatoes rotted on the roadside for lack of buyers. In Isingiro, maize sold for coins to middlemen. In Kasese, floods swept away rice while officials filed reports. In Mbarara, milk was poured on the ground because the nearest cooler was 60km away.
Then Rugambwa arrived. Not with a microphone, but with a hoe.
*Kigezi: Crying with the diggers*
Known as the “Switzerland of Africa,” Kigezi had long battled soil erosion and hunger. In Bukinda, Rugambwa walked off the hill and into the gardens, took a hoe from an elder, and dug alongside farmers as terraces washed away.
“If the soil is leaving, then our children will leave too,” she told them.
Today, Bukinda has stone terraces built by youth she mobilized under the Gamba N’okora initiative. Kigezi Irish potatoes are now graded, packed, and sold in Kampala supermarkets.
*Ankole: Milking hope back to life*
Ankole has cattle, but farmers earned little for their milk. Brokers paid 200 shillings a litre while consumers paid 2,000 in shops.
Rugambwa visited Kiruhura at 5 a.m. to sit with women milking at dawn. Within weeks, she returned with engineers. In three months, the Kiruhura Dairy Plant was running.
“Your milk is white gold. Never pour it again,” she told the mothers.
A litre now fetches 1,200 shillings for farmers. School fees are paid from milk sales, and women say their status in the home has improved.
*Bunyoro: Fighting for the land*
In Hoima, oil development displaced gardens and pushed youth off the soil. Rugambwa told them, “Oil will finish. The soil will not.”
She brought tractors to Kiziranfumbi, early-maturing cassava cuttings, and field-based agro-officers. She linked Buseruka farmers to Kinyara Sugar, telling them, “Plant. They will buy.”
One 22-year-old farmer she mentored now employs six people. “You will not be a slave on oil rigs. You will be a king on your land,” she had told him.
*Tooro: Reviving tea*
Fort Portal’s tea sector was collapsing, with factories closing and farmers uprooting plantations to pay school fees. Rugambwa visited Buyaga Tea Factory unannounced and pushed for fertilizer subsidies and feeder roads.
Today, the factory is operational again, and farmers are replanting tea. “Plant again. I will stand with you,” she told an elder who had uprooted his crop. He has since replanted.
*The cost behind the work*
Farmers say Rugambwa has used her own salary to buy seeds when government budgets delayed, spent nights in her car to reach cut-off communities, and endured criticism from critics who have never farmed.
“This woman is breaking,” one farmer said. “She carries the anger of every farmer lied to for 30 years. She does not sleep. She does not eat. She moves.”
*From the soil: A thank you*
Farmers across Western Uganda say Rugambwa boosted agriculture not with speeches, but by working in the mud; not with workshops, but with warehouses and better prices.
“The hills of Kigezi say thank you. The plains of Ankole say thank you. The soil of Bunyoro says thank you. The tea of Tooro says thank you,” they wrote.
Senior Presidential Advisor Peace Rugambwa has become a symbol of hands-on service in a region where agriculture defines livelihoods. For farmers who once felt forgotten, her message is simple: plant, and we will stand with you.
_For God and My Country. For the Farmers of Western Uganda._
