LUWERO, UGANDA- If you were to dare abroad, what is the likelihood that it would be in farming? Very few persons in Kenya today think of going abroad to fully delve into large-scale farming. However, there is one unique farmer in Uganda who has beaten these odds.

Grace Sylvia Mwangi is a Kenyan entrepreneur who grew up in Solai and thereafter moved to Nakuru, where she tried her luck in hairdressing.

In 2013, she relocated to Kampala to venture into agribusiness. Here, she worked with the government of Uganda under the Wealth Creation Initiative. Thanks to this, she got market for her fertilisers and was allocated land for farming.

“Someone got interested in my Kenyan way of planting maize and thus brought me on board.”

Grace Mwangi's main crop in Uganda is maize. PHOTO| COURTESY

Due to favorable farming conditions in Uganda, Grace managed to battle all the challenges she had experienced before. Within no time, she managed to increase her farmland from 5acres to 100acres. She ended up inspiring even the locals there who managed to adopt her way of farming.

Inspired by the positive turn of events, Grace championed a new project on a 2000-acre farm in Luwero district, Central Uganda, in collaboration between Kenyans and Ugandans.

Made up of 8 Ugandans and 16 Kenyans, they have come up with a new way of doing agriculture. They call it agro revolution/ agro pack. They identify a person with a huge amount of land who becomes their landlord and end up sharing their yields with the landlord as a means of payment.

Just like every other ambitious person, Grace has a dream. That one day, she will expand her farm to not only Uganda, but to the entire East African region. She says that this way, she will be able to promote food security.

Grace Mwangi sells some of her farm produce to Kenya and Uganda. PHOTO| COURTESY

She claims to have received support from the Ugandan government and thus she can do much more.

“We want to enable this group to realize the productive potential it has,” says John Kigula, Land legal consultant, “we should be able to enable them to get larger pieces of land.”

From her experience over the years, she says that one has to be there in the farm every time for his/her farm to yield fruits. Indeed, Grace Mwangi is a unique case of someone who managed to dare the odds.