The Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industries and Fisheries, has clarified on the status of the ACDP value addition facilities in Kamwenge district.
Speaking to the press in an interview, Ms Charlotte Kemigyisha, the MAAIF Principal Public Relations Officer, says some of the facilities have just started receiving government support due to delays in supply.
“Kamwenge District has four (4) value addition facilities, all of which are not yet operational. Three of the four are complete and the machinery has been delivered. The value addition facilities are however not yet powered up,” Ms Kemigyisha says.
She adds, “For the fourth facility, the construction has just started having received the government contribution late due to challenges of supplier number registration. All equipment is near power lines but the power supply is a single-phase yet the machines need three-phase power to operate.”
The Agriculture Cluster Development Project (ACDP) is a 6-year project implemented by MAAIF with support from the World Bank. The specific objectives are to; support intensification of on-farm production of five priority commodities, improve marketing and post-harvest handling of farm produce, develop institutional frameworks to support key regulatory MAAIF functions and promote the use of disruptive digital technologies for the transfer and dissemination of agricultural information.
The project targets to support 450,000 farmers aggregated into 300 Area-based Commodity Cooperative Enterprises (ACCEs) comprising 3,000 Rural Producer Organizations (RPOs) constituted by 30,000 Farmer Groups
MAAIF with technical support from Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development has undertaken an assessment of the power needs of the facilities in all the 57 project districts with the objective of finding resources to operationalize them.
According to the ministry, the final report from the assessment will inform a two-pronged approach that will be undertaken with; prioritization for connection where the Ministry of Energy already has plans for power connection, and that MAAIF will allocate some project resources to address the power connection issues, where that has not been provision.