By Olimatou Coker
The Resilience of Organisation for Transformative Smallholder Agriculture Project (ROOTS), a project focused on enhancing rice and vegetable value chains to improve food security and the livelihoods of smallholder farmers, is making impact on farming and famers in the rural Gambia.
The project also focuses on building the capacity of farmers, particularly women and youth and promoting sustainable agricultural practices.
During an ongoing media tour of the ROOTs intervention areas our reporter encountered several farmers with tales of how the project have impacted them. Musa Seedia Ceesay, 48, a farmer from Jahally told The Standard the impact of ROOTS interventions enabled him to increase 50% of his life savings compared to before.
“This intervention has helped me a lot, not only with rice production but also animal husbandry, I had enough rice for my family’s consumption and a lot to sell to pay for my families health and education bills,” Ceesay a father of 11 children told The Standard,
He said the project also provided seeds and training opportunities on the use of seed and fertilisers .
Saikou Kanteh, 51, from Jahalley said he
harvested 60 bags of rice from ROOT’s intervention, enough for his family’s use and to raise income for other family needs.
“I benefited from a high yielding seed variety to use on my farm”, Kanteh noted.
A woman farmer Hawa Sumareh said the ROOTS project provided 40% subsidy to farmers ranging from herbicides, fertilisers and rice varieties for the three -year period of its interventions.
The media tour is to document success stories from the project’s intervention sites and disseminate it to the wider public through various communication platforms.
