Problem Solving

Saidu Kanu's response: 'From a Livestock specialist perspective,smallholder farmers in Sierra Leone are grossly incapacitated in skills and resources to embark on value addition initiatives that can enable them competitively access markets for their products. Training and providing supporting services (electricity, transport,cooling facilities, etc)to facilitate transforming their products into long shelf-life processed and branded products. Of course this will have to be backed up with enabling policies.'

Simon Olagai's response: 'Dear Saidu Kanu, Thank you for that insightful information. I absolutely agree with you.However,the Ministry of Agriculture through the Global agriculture and Food Security project (GAFSP),implemented under the Smallholder Commercialization programme (SCP),have embarked on supporting farmers through formation of Agricultural Business Centers which are managed by Farmer Based Organisations throughout the country.
Equipment such as Rice mill,Thresher,Huellers,Generators,power tillers have been provided to these centers. The idea is to enable farmers process farm produce of standard quality.The challenge still remains with access to markets and attitude of diverse crop production is still low,much emphasis is focused on rice,cassava.

I have worked and met with farmers who have capacity to produce over 500 bags (50kg) of milled rice,700 bags of groundnuts in addition to processing of garri.The challenge is how to let the potential buyers know that this products exist in a particular village is one of the biggest challenge,hence some are discouraged to produce into large quantities since as you rightly said lack of capacity to transform the products into long shelf-life.

I am trying in my litle way to come up with communication strategy that will link farmers to potential buyers in the most remotest areas where infrastructure is a challenge.

I look forward to your suggestion.'