Assessing Opportunities and Challenges of Adopting Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture into Cities

Context and background Cities are rapidly growing with increased population pressure, which has impacted the city's urban and peri-urban areas, affecting the nature of land use. As such, the built-up area has swallowed up most land uses with the most affected land use being agriculture. Agriculture is a source of food security and employment amongst others and as such urban and peri-agriculture is very useful in addressing the needs of the city dwellers as it can be practiced both horizontally and vertically in limited space. This helps in filling in the gaps of high prices of food, limited supply of food in city markets, and unemployment amongst others. Since the COVID-19 lockdown in Uganda, households in Kampala city have embraced urban and peri-urban farming to meet family demands for livelihood, food and incomes. Goal and Objectives: To assess the opportunities and challenges of adopting urban and peri-urban agriculture in Kampala City by assessing the spatial changes of agricultural land use between 2002 and 2021, finding out the opportunities and challenges of adopting urban & peri-urban agriculture. Methodology: Document review, interviews, questionnaires and non-participatory observations were used to collect data. Remote sensing, qualitative and quantitative analysis methods were used to analyse data. Results: There was a decrease in agricultural land and open spaces with increase in built-up areas from 2002 to 2021. The opportunities identified for urban and peri-urban agriculture were mainly bolstering food security, generating employment, increasing income, and promoting environmental sustainability while the major challenges were limited land space, inadequate policy support and mindset and attitude barriers.