Frequent quarrels and conflicts are major drawbacks in farming households. Failure to be transparent about financial matters and inability to agree about how to handle family income are big stumbling blocks to development and poverty eradication.
Many people are poor not because they have no income-generating projects but because they lack financial discipline. It is one thing to plant coffee or to invest in livestock keeping and another to achieve a satisfactory regular income and progress.
It is no use getting Parish Development Model (PDM) or Emyoga loans or whatever financial support if the husband and wife are not transparent and ready to manage the activities that generate it.
Take the example of Henry who planted coffee on about an acre of the family land some five years ago. His wife takes care of the banana garden and also grows vegetables and some potatoes and cassava. Henry always refers to the coffee garden as his, personally.
He alone usually works in that garden. Sometimes, as head of the family, he orders their grown up sons and a daughter to do some work in the garden if he is around to supervise whatever they do. The sons and daughter go to secondary school but it is the mother who struggles to meet their school needs.
Henry likes spending his evenings in the nearby shopping centre where he also drinks some alcohol. He is also known to have two girlfriends in the shopping centre.
When he harvests the coffee, it is sold at once and no other family member ever gets to know how much money he gets.
Sometimes the adolescent children use his absence to go to his garden to harvest and sell the coffee without his knowledge in order to buy books and other school requirements that their mother cannot provide.
The mother grows and sells vegetables in the local market. She is always careful never to let her husband know where she hides her money. Last year she was granted a PDM loan, which must be paid back.
However, there is an urgent need for a new pit latrine in the home and she has contracted some men to do the work.
The boys own a pig, which is about to deliver piglets. They want to buy a solar-powered lighting system just for their bedroom so that they can read their books at night.