James Karuga | July 17, 2026
News Brief
Lilian Nakigozi grew up in Katanga slum in Kampala, Uganda, with eight siblings. Food was not guaranteed, and at times they survived on one maize porridge “meal” a day. This motivated her to start a business that would support people living in crowded urban spaces to produce food. She is the founder of Women Gro Initiative Uganda, which helps people set up vertical gardens and adopt circular regenerative agriculture practices to grow vegetables in the city. The gardens are made from locally available materials, like plastic bags and bottles, sacks, basins, tyres, or wood. Kitchen scraps like peelings and fruit wastes are composted or fed to worms to help soil fertility. Ms. Nakigozi says, “Our approach integrates food production with income generation and environmental sustainability, ensuring that women and their families build long-term resilience while improving nutrition outcomes."
Lilian Nakigozi grew up in Katanga slum in Kampala, Uganda, with eight siblings. Food was not guaranteed, and at times they survived on one maize porridge “meal” a day. Other days they slept hungry. This was not unique to them; neighbours suffered the same fate. But the worst time for her family was when she was eight years old, she lost her three-year-old sister to malnutrition.
Those experiences seared into her a purpose, to ensure that no child died from malnutrition and no mother would be helpless trying to feed their family. Ms. Nakigozi was a bright student and bursaries and scholarships funded her education. After graduating from Makerere University with a business administration degree in 2018, she researched online how people living in crowded urban spaces, like the slums, can optimize limited space to produce food, and discovered vertical gardens.
In November 2018, she founded Women Gro Initiative Uganda, a social enterprise for training youth and women in urban and peri-urban communities on growing food in vertical gardens using circular and regenerative agricultural practices to ensure they are food secure and improve their economic livelihoods. At the start of the initiative she invested $300 US to try the vertical gardens concept and refine it. Today an ideal one costs as little as $35.
Women Gro Initiative trains households to develop gardens from locally available materials, like plastic bags and bottles, sacks, basins, tyres, or wood. Vertical gardens are stuffed with soil mixed with organic fertilizers. But since some low-income households cannot raise enough money to get started in vertical farming, Women Gro Initiative Uganda puts them in groups and creates shared gardens for them, enabled by donor funding.
Ms. Nakigozi says, “Affordability is key with our solution because if it isn’t accessible, it cannot really scale. So, we’ve redefined our model to ensure that it fits within our community income levels, and can easily be scaled.”
For vertical gardens, crops are planted vertically rather than horizontally, to efficiently utilize space, and irrigation is provided by pipes with holes installed for watering from the top. The gardens are placed where they can get ample sunlight. On these vertical gardens, people grow indigenous and leafy greens, like spinach, amaranth, nightshade, collard greens (sukuma wiki), lettuce, plus onions, turmeric, rosemary and tomatoes.
Women Gro Initiative Uganda has also trained women to make compost. Kitchen scraps like peelings and fruit wastes are composted, and applied into the soil as compost manure. They also do vermicomposting where earthworms are fed kitchen scraps and organic waste, and they produce a rich vermicompost fertilizer that boosts soil health and its water holding capacity. Women are also trained on water conservation practices like mulching, and some have drip kits for irrigation.
A typical vertical garden can accommodate up to 200 leafy vegetables. Since cabbages need larger spaces, they are planted on open compounds. According to Ms. Nakigozi, with proper management each vertical garden yields 25 to 35 kilograms of vegetables monthly, or about 300-420 kilograms annually. Pests and diseases are controlled naturally by crop rotation to break pests and disease cycles. And through companion planting of vegetables with onions whose pungent smell repels some pests.
Women Gro Initiative Uganda has established 5,000 vertical farms around Uganda that have improved household food production and consumption for nearly 12,000 people. According to Ms. Nakigozi, some families are able to eat three meals a day, unlike before when they got none or just one meal daily. They have supported about 8,000 women with vertical farms, which is about 80% of all the participants trained by Women Gro Initiative Uganda. Ms Nakigozi says that was deliberate because women in African communities play a vital role in household nutrition and food provision.
Christine Nekessa is a young urban farmer from Katale, a Kampala suburb and a beneficiary of the Women Gro Initiative Uganda trainings. Her compound is littered with spring onions and various leafy vegetables organically growing on vertical gardens on sacks, shade nets, veranda, basins and raised wooden platforms. She makes composted manure from rabbit and goat droppings and sells to other vertical farmers. She also sells vegetables and sets up vertical gardens for other people with limited urban spaces at a fee. This has enabled her to be financially independent.
The key to long-term success of the vertical farms is income generation. Women Gro Initiative Uganda links the vertical farming communities to markets, like hotels, schools, and local markets. They also train them on agribusiness skills like record and book keeping to help them track their revenues and savings.
Ms. Nakigozi says, “Our approach integrates food production with income generation and environmental sustainability, ensuring that women and their families build long-term resilience while improving nutrition outcomes.”
This resource is funded by the IKEA Foundation under the project “Sustainable Dialogue and Knowledge Sharing Communication Platforms”