Policy and regulatory reform options for seed market development: Expanding the empirical evidence base in Uganda

This project will improve the functioning, integration, and inclusiveness of seed systems and markets in Uganda by strengthening links between the regulatory framework, seed providers, and seed users across multiple dimensions. The project is a timely intervention designed to leverage the rapid growth in Uganda’s market opportunities for seeds, traits, and agricultural commodities while addressing the persistent market and institutional failures that limit the transmission of information between smallholder farmers and seed providers. Ultimately, the project will advance seed system development in Uganda by providing realistic, evidence-based policy options that accelerate crop-specific development, production, and marketing of new varieties and quality seeds to smallholders across the country.

Emphasis will be placed on filling three critical knowledge gaps in the country’s policy discourse on seed systems. First, the project will identify factors constraining the demand for seeds and traits across a range of informal and formal seed systems (represented by different crops), farmer typologies (with special attention to gender and youth), and agro-ecologies (representing variation in climate vulnerability), and test strategies designed to relax these constraints in the field. Second, the project will analyse the productive and innovative capacity of seed providers across Uganda, including foreign firms, domestic companies, small- and medium-sized enterprises, farmer organizations, and individual farmer-entrepreneurs, and test policy and regulatory interventions to increase this capacity. Third, the project will engage with strategic decision-makers to analyse how policies, investment, and regulatory solutions that expand inclusive access to—and the benefits from—new varieties and quality seed can be implemented. Taken together, research on these three topics will provide new and salient insights to encourage growth in opportunities for farmers, entrepreneurs, and investors.