The contribution of rural institutions to rural development: Study of smallholder farmer groups and NGOs in Uganda

This paper presents results from a quantitative analysis of the contribution of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and smallholder farmer groups as sample rural institutions in addressing four main rural developmental objectives via improving health, education, agriculture and industry. The study involved 87 respondents from 40 organizations including19 NGOs and 21 smallholder farmer groups from central region of Uganda. Data from questionnaires, focus group discussions, interviews, key informants and literature reviews were used in the study. The results suggest that improving health, hence rural development is strongly related to investing in increased awareness and access and sharing of healthcare information, effective health policy formulation and effective delivery of health service. However, and seemingly surprisingly health financing subsidies is found to impact rural development through its negative effect on health improvement. On achieving rural prosperity through better education, this study suggests that the larger the operational reach of the organisations involved as well as spending on R&D are not positive contributors and therefore hurt rural development objective. On the other hand, the larger the personnel number of the rural organisations are, utilization of information technology, more financing and appropriate public education policy are consistent with a priori expectation to improve education and rural development. To increase agricultural contribution to achieving rural prosperity, agricultural resource availability and the larger the geographic operational reach of the rural organisations are found to have strong positive effects. Basic training, access to information and research and extension services and access to factors of production are found to be inimical to agricultural improvement. Appropriate rural policies are found to support rural industry but the larger the operational reach of the organisation are not favourable to rural industrial improvement.