Agricultural Support Program in Sierra Leone
Council of Churches in Sierra Leone (CCSL)
One thousand and eighty households--600 headed by women and 480 by young families--in eight rural communities are benefiting from a food security program, with the help of Church World Service and partner the Council of Churches in Sierra Leone. The total number of people are being helped by the three-year project is some 6,480.
The decade-long Sierra Leone civil war—that ended in 2002--brought with it many social, political, and economic problems. Homes were destroyed, families separated, loved ones lost. Sierra Leone continues to experience mass unemployment among young people and adults, leading to in increased poverty and extreme hardship for the majority of people.
In the Kambia district, CCSL is helping women heads-of-household restart vegetable gardening. Most women in the Kambia district have experience growing and marketing vegetables. The district is the main supplier of vegetables for most of the big towns in Sierra Leone, including the capital, Freetown. Since returning to the district following the war, however, most of the women have lacked the resources to restart their gardening activities. The women are receiving basic gardening inputs and learning about fertilizer application, improved vegetable cultivation and marketing methods, and simple accounting and record-keeping.
In the remote Safroko Limba chiefdom, in Bombali district, women are taking part in groundnut cultivation. The region, with its mix of savannah and woodland vegetation and about six months of rainfall, is very favorable to growing groundnuts. Groundnuts are both a subsistence and a cash crop, making them useful for feeding families and for sale at the market. Each household is receiving two bushels of groundnuts for planting.
Young male-headed families in both districts--where about 85 percent of people are subsistence rice farmers--are taking part in the rice cultivation part of the project. Since rice cultivation is a seasonal activity in Sierra Leone--from February to the end of October--the farm families will also receive cassava cuttings to grow in the "off season." Cassava, second to rice as a staple food in Sierra Leone, is eaten mostly in the "hunger period" between July and September. Each household involved in the project is receiving five bundles of cassava--enough to plant one-half acre.
Support for Church World Service helps make this program possible.
Updated 3/29/2007
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