Among Central American countries, Nicaragua has made the firmest commitment to urban and peri-urban agriculture. The expansion of Upa is a key strategy in its national development plan for 2012-2016, and a recently launched government programme aims at establishing 250 000 home gardens in cities around the country. By recent estimates, more than a quarter of urban Nicaraguans live below the national poverty line. The government sees Upa not only as a means of improving the urban poor’s access to food and reducing levels of poverty, but as fundamental to its policies for developing the family economy and for achieving national food security and food sovereignty. The plan is to establish home gardens and community seed banks, provide urban food producers with training, access to inputs and assistance in marketing their produce, and to develop irrigation technologies to overcome seasonal water scarcities. Much of the groundwork for that forward-looking national policy and the home gardening programme was laid by a project that began in 2010 in two of Managua’s poorest and most densely populated areas.