By Olimatou Coker
The Gambia Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Agriculture and Employments Association in collaboration with the roots project, has organized a high-level breakfast meeting on agriculture financing and a roundtable dialogue on public-private producer partnership (4ps) at a meeting held at Coco Ocean.
The objective of the project is to increase agricultural productivity and accessible to markets for enhanced food security, nutrition and resilience of family farms and farmer oragisations.
The project targeted 39 districts based on poverty, vulnerability, remoteness, quality and scale of infrastructure and harmonization with other donors supported programs.
Beneficiary categories are smallholder, micro- entrepreneurs and poor rural youth and women.
Speaking, Mrs. Sarata Conateh, CEO of GCCI, said: “At the GCCI we have long been advocating for the public, private partnership as an effective tool to achieve socio-economic development”.
She said the PPP unit under the ministry of finance currently has been a partner of the chamber.
CEO Conateh added that the chamber remains committed to the elevation and pride of operators across the agricultural value chain.
Lamin S.Darboe, Senior Climate Smart Agriculture Office (ROOTs), said this session is a very important project to the roots. “As you may be aware, that is a 6-year project under the government of the Gambia at the Ministry of Agriculture which is here to support production and marketing of two very important value change quality commodities in the Gambia which is rice and vegetable production”.
Darboe added that the project will also do a lot of support to the smallholder famers interms of production and productivity in the rural communities and will also go further to ensure that there is market in anything the farms are producing.
“As a means of bringing this stakeholders together within the project design, we have what we called as 4ps which is the public private and producer partnership so that there is opportunity for not only the producers but also for other private actors “.
Fatou Jammeh Touray, Deputy Permanent Secreatry of Projects and Programs at the Ministry of Agriculure, said as a sector they are very happy to witness a day like this, a day when their hopes are so high that their sector will be moving from were they are to another level that will be for the best of the Gambian nation.
“Please, we are expecting the roots project to be a stepping stone for the development of farmers of this country and the empowerment of the financial institutions both capacity wise and also a project that will be sustainable”.
