Helping People Help Myself

NERICA (New Rice for Africa) became well-known in Sierra Leone partially due to the Project funded by African Development Bank. The project collaborated with Ministry of Agriculture and Technical Agency (Sierra Leone Agriculture Research Institute: SRARI) to produce more NERICA seeds, demonstrate cultivation process and yields compared to other varieties, provide extension services, support land development and provide subsidized inputs as initial boost for income increase which will lead to graduation from subsidies in next cultivation cycle.

In fact, it was West Africa where NERICA was created by WARDA (West Africa Rice Development Association *). So far, tons of NERICA seeds were produced and disseminated to farmers along with other inputs and equipment. 

The Supervision Team and some project staff visited some demonstration sites and rice fields where we could interact with local farmers and discuss progress as well as remaining challenges.

Great awareness of NERICA as higher yield variety was clearly observed across districts and villages. Line planting, a better planting methodology became more common even among very poor farmers. Farmers groups and farmers associations were expanding and improving their functions although some of them are still new and need to  learn from matured groups.

Land development and scaling up found to be unbeaten challenges. These required adequate equipment, skills, knowledge, business plans and affordable financing options. 

One private firm was passionately tackling and gradually overcoming these challenges, which gave me an inspiration and great hope for Sierra Leone's future. The below picture shows you the very different scale than the above ones. Actually, the improved yield of above farmers are 1.6-1.8 ton/ha while the primitive farmers remain 1-1.3t/ha. Now how much yield this company gets? It's about 4.2 t/ha without fertilizer and 7.6t/ha with fertilizer. So, this is the potential of Sierra Leone agriculture. We should invest more in agriculture sector in Sierra Leone and help small farmers to shift towards large scale farming.