Bridging agroecology: students learning from Buliisa farmers

Project Story

This project is a community- and student-led initiative that emerged from international student collaboration and direct engagement with an Indigenous farming community in Buliisa, Uganda.

Helena, a Finnish student selected for the EU-funded AgrGrow challenge, had the amazing opportunity to visit Uganda in October 2025 with her peers and senior lecturer to explore the maize value chain. Before her journey, a kingfisher appeared in her dreams—a rare Finnish winter visitor that migrates from East Africa. She later discovered these birds inhabit the banks of Lake Albert near Buliisa district—this is where our project got started.

She also learned the name Kingfisher carries deeper significance. The "Kingfisher" oil project, operated by China's state-owned CNOOC corporation, has devastated this region through human rights violations and environmental destruction. By naming this initiative Kingfisher, we honor both the bird and the cultural ecology it represents, while challenging these injustices.

Helena was one of the students participating in the EU-funded University collaboration "AgriGrow," where students were learning by creating solutions for challenges in the maize value chain in Uganda. The Finnish students organized a visit to meet the Indigenous community in Buliisa district, learning about their community and traditional farming practices. This visit was facilitated by AFRICE and sparked a connection that led to a project aiming to bridge academic education with indigenous knowledge. Through lived experience and field observation, the students recognized a critical gap in agricultural education: the systematic undervaluing of indigenous farming knowledge in favor of industrial input-dependent models.

Our Mission

Our intention is to bridge academic agriculture education with indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) by facilitating field-based apprenticeships and internships, enabling students to learn directly from indigenous farmers and custodians through non-extractive, relationship-based knowledge exchange, and integrating indigenous agroecology into formal university learning.

We want to make this possible by ensuring needed support for student internships and field trips, enabling the next generation to learn from both scientific and community-based approaches to farming. Our host organization AFRICE (African Institute for Culture and Ecology) has already worked in the area for over a decade, empowering communities, facilitating cultural restoration, and educating on regenerative practices.

Working with the Bagungu community in Buliisa district, we are committed to regenerating the land while preserving cultural wisdom and contributing to education.

Background

Uganda has adopted a national agroecology strategy aimed at improving food security, strengthening climate resilience, and protecting ecosystems. The strategy calls for stronger learning systems, collaboration between farmers and institutions, and approaches grounded in real-life situations rather than theory alone. However, a major barrier persists: the people who carry lived agroecology practice, including local farming communities, seed custodians, elders, and women knowledge holders, are rarely treated as serious knowledge partners within formal agricultural education.

In Buliisa District, indigenous and local farming systems are central to seed diversity, soil health, water management, and ecosystem stewardship. Yet they are usually undervalued within formal training, where students are often taught externally designed models that depend on hybrid seeds and chemical inputs. This produces graduates with limited practice-based competence and weak understanding of smallholder food systems, while communities face weakening intergenerational transfer of farming knowledge and governance.

As Uganda seeks to scale agroecology nationally, the transition will remain shallow if indigenous knowledge and customary stewardship are not recognized as foundations for learning. Without proper, hands-on learning models that rebuild relationships between students, universities, and knowledge holders, agroecology risks being adopted as an isolated practice rather than a real food sovereignty approach rooted in local knowledge and ecological community governance. This project responds to that gap by building a student-community exchange and apprenticeship that treats indigenous farmers as teachers and strengthens intergenerational knowledge transfer.

Opportunity

We have a connection.

Finnish students of Sustainable Development in Environmental Planning made a connection with students of the Department of Agriculture & Environmental Sciences and Department of Nutrition, Food Science & Technology, and they are building a bridge to the Buliisa community through AFRICE. Despite living far across from each other, they are determined to create an alliance that brings us a step closer to strong climate-smart solutions in food production and community-based development.

Häme University of Applied Sciences (Finland) and Bugema University (Uganda) have both expressed their support for this student-led initiative. African Institute for Culture and Ecology (AFRICE), as a partner, plays an essential role in this project proposal.

Project Goals and Activities

Contributing to agroecology grounded in Earth Jurisprudence and food sovereignty, we hope to create increased academic recognition of indigenous farming systems and stronger university–community relationships, as well as ethical documentation of indigenous knowledge.

You may read more about our project on this website: forestpeople.fi/kingfisher