A study of earlier Uganda collaboration
Supply-chain maps supported shared discussions of household resilience in Karamoja, Uganda, according to a Journal of Public Health Policy paper published on 12 August 2026. The authors revisit work identified in the title as 2016–2020 and draw on a six-year collaboration involving MIT, The George Washington University and USAID's Uganda mission.
USAID asked the team in 2019 to extend agricultural-market mapping to household resilience in Karamoja. Its objectives were to examine the region through a supply-chain lens and support collaboration in the Karamoja Resilience Cluster, which brought together humanitarian and development activities.
Maps connect household resilience and markets
The System Pathways Toolkit adapts causal-loop diagrams to connect behaviours, relationships and conditions. The team developed the household-resilience map with eight USAID implementing partners and stakeholders from other donor-funded activities. Partners edited the map, and consultations checked that it reflected their perspectives. Livestock and iron-rich bean market maps followed in 2020.
The bean-market map linked collective marketing, farmer participation, traders and reliable access to inputs. It also identified opportunities to use established trader networks and share transport across crops such as sorghum, maize and sunflower. Transport appeared repeatedly as a constraint affecting flows of goods, money and market information.
Workshop feedback and a notional simulation
At a January 2020 workshop, the household-resilience map structured communication and helped participants locate related activities and potential collaboration. Water access, conflict and gender emerged as cross-cutting concerns. The authors report positive outcomes captured through post-event feedback and explicitly state that those outcomes were not directly quantified.
The team also developed a simple system-dynamics simulation of household resilience. The authors describe it as notional because the available data were insufficient for proper calibration and validation. In their account, the value of the Karamoja maps included the shared process of building and revising them.
Indicator monitoring was not completed in Karamoja
A further stage would have added available indicators to the Karamoja maps to track changes. COVID-19 redirected USAID's attention and cut the engagement short. The researchers could not follow longer-term map use or document its influence on programming. They instead shifted to the wider Uganda market-system mapping work, which supported rapid assessment of pandemic disruptions.
The authors identify market fragmentation and sparse data as important limitations and emphasise collaborative model construction for shared understanding and intervention design. USAID funded the work through contract AID-OAA-A-12-00095 and its Uganda contribution to the HESN agreement with MIT, with The George Washington University as a sub-awardee. The paper states that no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study; the authors declare no competing interests.
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System-wide modeling approaches for integrating supply chains into food security analysis: lessons from Uganda 2016–2020 ↗
Journal of Public Health Policy · CC-BY-4.0 ↗. Luc Gendre, Courtney Blair, Tristan Downing, Jarrod Goentzel, Erica Gralla and Timothy Russell (2026). System-wide modeling approaches for integrating supply chains into food security analysis: lessons from Uganda 2016–2020. Journal of Public Health Policy 47,97–110,12 August 2026. DOI:10.1057/s41271-026-00644-7. © The Author(s) 2026. CC BY 4.0. Editorial adaptation and translation: FoodRadar. Adapted by FoodRadar.