Leveraging collaboration to enhance institutional strength

The Feed the Future Uganda Institutional and Systems Strengthening (ISS) Activity is a market systems development Activity that builds capacity and strengthens Government of Uganda’s (GOU) Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) and Industry Apex Organizations (IAOs). These entities are vital to driving inclusive agriculture led economic growth. The Activity supports these entities to improve their internal processes and strengthen structures critical for sectoral coordination. The goal is to improve accountability, responsiveness, and performance of the MDAs and IAOs that will enable them to fulfill their duties, creating a more conducive environment for market actors to engage in the agriculture sector. 

To achieve impact and strengthen the system, the Activity faciltitatively collaborates with institutions with aligning mandates to deliver it's scope. This includes MDAs, IAOs, think tanks and professional bodies. 
 
The Activity set out to support MDAs to develop digital solutions to strengthen their capacity in service delivery and policy implementation. However, at inception of this support, the digital solutions that had been envisioned at the various MDA's came to a halt as the beneficiaries requests were beyond Activity threshold. They requested for hardware,software servers to set up and host the digital solutions. As a result of several pause and reflect sessions and further engagement with the beneficiary MDAs, the Activity learned of and collaborated with NITA-U an institution mandated to coordinate and regulate information technology services. This collaboration has supported 5 MDAs to pilot 6 digital solutions all aimed at improvement of service delivery and policy implementation.