Nearly a year ago, I posted on this forum asking the global Effective Altruism community to help me install a grain cleaning, drying and storage facility that would enable the rural poor in my region of Busoga, in eastern Uganda, to access markets for their grains. 

This facility, if installed, would enhance our postharvest handling and storage capability, enabling my project (the UCF) to expand our current white sorghum project with the goal of covering every part of Kamuli & Buyende, and eventually our entire region of Busoga -- a region that currently has the most dreaded levels of poverty in Uganda. 

This facility, if installed, would also enable us to engage big institutional buyers of grains, as well as international relief agencies like the UN's WFP, Red Cross, UNHCR, GOAL, World Vision etc (who buy grains in their relief work) -- plus all breweries across east Africa.

The UN's WFP, alone, is currently the biggest buyer of grains in Africa, and buying from rural smallholder farmers is their main priority, but their suppliers must meet strict postharvest handling standards (due to things like aflatoxin contamination in grains), and this is what our intended grain facility was going to help with.

This, in turn, would have enabled rural poor farmers in our region to access high value markets for their produce, placing them on a self-sustainable path from chronic poverty. 

How it all went:

My request simply didn't make it, for two reasons: 

1) some people here said my request was difficult to assess from an EA standpoint.

2) after a detailed discussion with the UK firm Alvan Blanch -- the people who were going to install for us this facility -- they said the GBP 339,403 that they had quoted for us only included the cost of plant equipment, and shipment to Mombasa (Kenya), not Uganda. 

Alvan Blanch said this money doesn't include civil works and sitework, i.e., the actual installation of the facility; the needed mechanical and electrical installations; wiring materials; crane and forklift hire; personnel lifting equipment and its hire, the warehouse that will house this facility -- as well as taxation and freight from Mombasa to Kamuli. 

After a detailed discussion with Alvan Blanch, we found that, when all these things are included, the total cost for installing this facility would be $814,000 (or £656,000), nearly twice the original estimate. 

Still, since this facility would have given us the capacity to work with rural poor farmers in every part of Kamuli & Buyende, and eventually our entire region of Busoga -- a region the size of the west African country "Gambia" -- to me, the £656,000 would still be worth it, if I was able to find people who are willing to help us get this facility installed.  

Some EAs genuinely wanted to help:

After posting my original request on this forum last April, one person here named Roddy not only donated to the UCF, but also said he was willing to work together with other EAs to assess the cost-effectiveness of our intended grain facility, and to provide funding. 

Roddy's offer didn't go any further, because no other EAs engaged with him on this.

Another person on this forum named Michael emailed me saying he was personally willing to fund the silo alone (which was priced at £92,761 in Alvan Blanch's original quote), so we can later expand from there. However, after having a detailed discussion about Alvan Blanch's quote, and realizing that the total cost indicated in that quote didn't include many other things that were essential, Michael, too, simply pulled back. 

That is where the whole talk about my intended grain facility ended. 

Still:

After reading my original post, some people here (~3 people in total) donated to the UCF. These included Roddy; someone named Benjamin Plaut who gave $1,000 via DonorBox, and another who anonymously donated $1,000 via Benevity, but whom I suspect to have originated from this forum because his donation came in the same week that I posted here. Altogether, these people donated $2,200, which was used to run our sorghum work.

Photos from our work in 2024 are in this Microsoft OneDrive folder, and also on this page.

 Currently, the UCF provides all our target farmers with all the needed inputs (seed, tarpaulins, liquid fertilizers/pesticides, spray pumps etc) free of charge, only as a hand-up, because many can’t afford them. 

Our intended grain facility is the only thing that would have catalyzed self-sustainability, by enabling our target farmers to access better markets for their produce, which in turn would give these farmers the self-urge to produce more -- hence the ability to use their own incomes to secure the needed inputs on their own, making our work self-sustaining. 

Moreover:

My ultimate intent for this grain facility wasn't to make it another traditional capitalist endeavor, nope. As someone who hereditarily belongs to this rather impoverished part of the world, my goal was to ultimately make this grain facility community-owned.

With the grain facility in place, my goal was to simply use it as a leverage, to enable me develop an INTEGRATED agro-processing plant that would create market linkages for 6-10 different types of crops (all grains/cereals, cassava, mangoes, pineapples, oranges etc), enabling the rural poor in our region to diversify their incomes and escape poverty. 

The integrated plant itself, meanwhile, would be 80% owned by all the rural poor farmers across Busoga who would be supplying produce to this plant, with the other 20% owned by the UCF itself as a way of sustaining our underlying work of supporting more farmers. 

I am not ready to give up:

Looking at where I am coming from (i.e., my own lifelong battle with poverty), and local people's circumstances in my region, I am not happy sitting back, or sitting idly by.

The last resort:

Towards the end of 2024, I made one other effort to try and raise support for the intended grain facility: a campaign that I addressed to the crypto/web3 community.

That campaign, too, didn't work. But it gave me some basic knowledge of crypto/web3. Before that, I didn't know anything about crypto. 

So, recently, I decided to take one more step that I think may ultimately enable me to at least self-fund the grain facility alone: getting into crypto myself, not as a daily trader, but by only acquiring those tokens that have real utility, when they are still at very low prices, and then holding until prices go up. 

In other words, I want to use crypto HODLing as a way of self-funding my work on poverty.

My final request for EA:

If I had ~$10,000 to invest in some low cap utility tokens now, I believe I will ultimately be able to self-finance our intended grain facility in the not-so-distant future, and even keep some money to provide initial inputs to our target farmers (after installing this facility).

If you are reading this, and would like to help me raise the $10,000 to enable me do just that (which in turn could mean self-sustainability for our work on extreme poverty), I have created some crypto addresses where you can contribute now, if you use crypto.

If you don't use crypto, you can also help by making a bank transfer using the info here.

The crypto addresses are:

USDT (network: TRC20):  TBnop4ZCcHLK2BUDsRPy6bL9Bd6EPg6Y44

BTC (network: Bitcoin):  3BqtsGXDs49XzwmeT91L3uTCW4kjB5rqcn

Eth (net: Ethereum):  0xb91fedacbed4170eebc0af44b8389d93eb309f44

SOL (net: Solana):  DscAs9xkCb4XrRtxrL9v5kxULMiaL8rjS7e1m9WPifAU

Conclusion:

From the little that I know about EA, you are a community of people who believe not just in cost-effectiveness, but also in amplified impact. The $10,000 that I am asking you, with its potential to result in the installation of our $814,000 intended grain facility, is one way to amplify your support in a truly impoverished part of the world.

Anthony, founder UCF     |     anthony@ugandafarm.org

x.com/KaluluAnthony     |      whatsapp:  +256 759 908591

voice calls:  +256 771 497121    /     +256 782 601073

skype:  organic_persp  (I am available for video calls any day, with anyone who wants to speak with me).