Rural sector responses to economic crisis in Uganda

This paper, based on a survey of farm households in Uganda's Masaka district, analyses the impact of the country's economic decline on the rural sector. The economic crisis has reduced the flow of resources from the urban areas, in terms of both goods and services and remittances from urban‐based relatives. To preserve their livelihoods, rural dwellers have had to diversify their sources of income. Ability to do this is constrained not only by household characteristics, such as size, age and education of head and time endowment, but also by economic variables such as the existence of markets, size of land holding and credit availability. It is argued that to reincorporate peasants into the modern sector it is necessary to remove the barriers which prevent them from realizing a fair return on their production factors and assets.