The peasantry remain poor, while farming experts turn drug dealers

As usual, the Christmas season allowed us to escape from town and take the children away from television and other mind-bending gadgetry.

Two weeks away from all these things teaches them about life elsewhere, and that it is a perfectly good alternative to urban living and its sometimes corrupting artificialities.

They have grown to like it.

The village has scores of wild plants, insects and birds to look at, flowers to pick, and animals, big and small, to watch and, from time to time, touch and feel.

This Christmas, they had the added bonus of watching with fascination an uncle, an émigré animal health scientist, examine, vaccinate, and treat different types of livestock for a variety of conditions.

In town, they would have had no chance of watching all that at close range and learning about animal medicine.  

As for me, I again had a chance to observe and experience how village people spend their time and what issues preoccupy them.

It provided further insights into why poverty in rural areas can be so persistent and difficult to eradicate.

Throughout the period I have spent working as a social scientist, by now the better part of a decade and a half, I have encountered situations that shed ample light on why poor people remain poor.

As anyone with interest in the subject knows, government failure is at the heart of the matter.

For people to exit from poverty or at the very least to have realistic chances of doing so, they must be healthy. For this to happen, they should be adequately protected from the causes of ill health. The most effective weapon here is health education.

It entails telling people what they have to do to minimise their chances of falling ill, especially with conditions that interfere with their capacity to engage in income-generating and livelihood-enhancing activities.

Second, should they fall ill, the infrastructure for restoring them to good health should be in place.  In much of rural Uganda, these pre-conditions remain largely absent. And so the poor remain poor. 

However, good health is only the beginning.

The ability of poor people to lift themselves out of poverty also depends on their possession of productive assets, especially land.