Farm and community practice report carried out at the Soroti child development programme under the sustainability project.

Abstract

Soroti child development centre is anon government organisation dealing with activities of child ministry, child sponsorship and parental assistance. It also deals with livelihood activities of sustainability through crop production, an approach towards group farming and collective marketing. During my farm and community attachment, I managed to cover crosscutting activities within the culture and environment of the organisation that included: Child ministry, daily devotions, training of the selected project beneficiaries on enterprise selection, training the project beneficiaries on agronomic practices of groundnuts as the major enterprise selected among other crop enterprises. Participated in the quality assurance team during the purchase of groundnut seed for the farmers, Weighed and distributed seed to the project beneficiaries and ensured right site selection for groundnuts production in the different project areas to best fit into sandy loamy or clay loamy soils suitable for groundnuts production. I also practically demonstrated on the recommended planting techniques and spacing of groundnuts in all the gardens of the beneficiaries, I also practically participated in the soy bean value chain survey conducted by SNV a project with the operational areas where use of data collection tools such as kenga mobile, ODK, kobo collect were used, I also set up refresher training to the farmers on group dynamics. During the outreach I have gained better communication skills relevant to my carrier excellence and also community diagnosis skills. I was responsible of agronomy section in the sustainability project where I delivered agricultural technical knowledge on groundnuts production beside the social aspect and the community outreach attachment has further broadened and opened up my academic carrier into diversity and brought in richer options for carrier progress without decline. It was concluded that the community outreach exposes a student to think out of the box and introduces a unique approach to deliver and acquire knowledge due to diversity in the learning environment and therefore recommended that the university should be willing to accommodate matters that arise outside its curriculum as this offers more learning grounds to the students as this has been evidenced in my experience during this attachment.