Key Trends from the 2002 country brief

• Since the early 1980s, total numbers of agricultural researchers increased only slightly. Numbers of researchers working in the higher education sector quadrupled during the past two decades, but this increase was offset by a contraction of researcher numbers in the government sector of about 10 percent over the same period.
• NARO is the main agricultural research agency in Uganda and accounted for about three quarters of Uganda’s total spending and research staff in 2000.
• The intensity of Uganda’s investment efforts in agricultural research (that is, research investments' share of total agricultural GDP) increased during the 1990s to 0.5 percent in 2000, but appears to remain below the Sub-Saharan African average.
• NARO is highly dependent on donor funding. During 1995-2001, close to two thirds of total revenue came from the World Bank and other donors. Donor funds to NARO will decrease by half in the next few years, and it is not expected that government and other funding sources will increase sufficiently to maintain NARO’s current funding levels.

Uganda