The principle of embracing multi-stakeholder inclusivity in the sub national and national Food System Summit dialogues creates a need to strive to showcase as many voices as possible, capturing diverse cultural, professional and gender specific perspectives to ensure design policy options that deliver against multiple public goods and across these various systems. Mobile technology and SMS platforms of recent have represented low-cost means with the potential to reach a wide population and foster open dialogue on issues of public concern
It is against this background that the United Nations Resident Coordinator’s Office in Uganda partnered with UNICEF to develop a concept for the use of the U-report as an innovative component under the communications area to offer a platform that complements the planned dialogues to showcase as many voices as possible on the food systems.
U-Report:
U-Report is a free SMS-based platform that allows Ugandans to report on issues affecting them and their communities as well as to get real-time information and feedback on new initiatives or campaigns. U-report offers young Ugandans and the public at large a chance to voice their opinions on pertinent issues like health, education, water, sanitation and hygiene, youth unemployment, HIV/AIDS, disease outbreaks like Ebola and COVID-19 and natural disasters like drought, floods and landslides.
· To compliment the media plan to raise greater awareness and provide valuable information on the food system summit
· Amplify the voices of more people including youth and women on issues regarding food systems in the country and what should be done for the future
· Using the platform to encourage dialogue among the population on issues related to food systems
Expected outcomes
· Views from more people including youth and women involved in food systems in Uganda taken up to inform the Uganda commitment paper from the national dialogues
· More people made aware of the food systems summit
· More dialogues among the population about food systems encouraged
Participating groups
Gender: 71% of U-Reporters who participated in the food systems summit dialogue polls were male while 29% were females. This is mainly male dominated because currently they are the majority of U-Reporters registered on the system nationally.However steps are underway to close the gap between males and females
Age Groups: The majority of U-Reporters (52%) who participated were between 24—64 years old. This is so because U-Report mobile phone and its this age group that most people do own phones
Occupation: The majority 27% of the the U-Reporters who participated in this survey were students while 19% were farmers
· Questions/Messages: Messages were both informational and poll questions. Informational messaegs were sent subsequently with poll questions to create awareness about the food systems dialogue, poll questions were either multiple-choice allowing a single answer, or open ended response allowing U-Reporters to express themselves freely without having to select from any given options
· Dates: All the five action tracks were run within the months of July through August 2021 which each action track running on weekly basis. Action track 1 was run on 16th July and the last action track 5 was run on 16th August, and closed on 21st August 2021.
· Sample Size: The initial and consent message was sent to a group of 264,000 randomly selected U-Reporters to ask to introduce the food systems summit dialogue and ask for their consent to participate and 67,970 U-Reporters consented. A group composed of these consented U-Reporters was then created and made a target group upon which all the five action tracks were surveyed on.
· All the five action tracks generated an overall total of 941,720 messages in form of poll responses and comments of U-Reporters expressing their own independent views about the food systems summit dialogue.
· Links to poll results in the U-Report public website
- Action Track 1: https://uganda.ureport.in/opinion/5193/
- Action Track 2: https://uganda.ureport.in/opinion/5195/
- Action Track 3: https://uganda.ureport.in/opinion/5230/
- Action Track 4: https://uganda.ureport.in/opinion/5259/
- Action Track 5: https://uganda.ureport.in/opinion/5260/
About the Data
This poll series data reflects the information provided by the respondents, and is not statistically representative of young people globally, or in any specific country or region. U-Report as a community does not have a goal of statistical representativeness among its membership and no sampling stratification was employed. Post-stratification weighting was not applied during the analysis of this poll.
U-Report data should not be used as a single source of information to make decisions, but rather should be used to complement more statistically robust methods of gathering data.
UNICEF values the voices of young people and seeks to recognize their experiences and views, and the data are considered a reliable reflection of the information the respondents have provided to UReport.
