ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how some of the weaknesses can be overcome by employing an anthropological perspective in the analysis of an organization-intensive development project sponsored by Agency for International Development (AID) in Uganda during the period 1979-1983. Anthropologists played key roles in the Uganda program, helping to focus AID’s attention on a worthy group, a genuine need, and a sound distributional mechanism. The general lack of hoes during the 1979–1981 period made farmers in the north extremely reluctant to share their scarce, worn-out, and fragile tools, even among close agnatic kin, or to use them in the fields of another. The Uganda cooperative movement emerged as a potentially effective distributional structure. District cooperative unions were responsible for collecting the commodities from Uganda Cooperative Central Union. The chapter examines the results of the hoe distribution program at regional and community levels, and also looks at the effects of the program on Uganda’s cooperative movement.
