By Fatou B. Cham
The Minister of Agriculture, Hon. Dr. Demba Sabally, recently handed over the site for the construction of cold storage in Soma, Lower River Region, costing approximately 2.85 million Dalasi. This initiative is under the IFAD and Gambia Government-funded Resilience of Organisations for Transformative Smallholder Agriculture (ROOTS) project, being implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture.
Speaking at the event, Hon. Sabally stated that the aim of the initiative is to minimise post-harvest losses encountered by the communities’ vegetable producers, as well as strengthen their capacity to negotiate favorable prices for the purchase of their products, without the imminent threat of being perished.
“You will recall that this process started last October, when my Ministry agreed with IFAD, the principal donor of the ROOTS project, to construct three cold storage facilities around the country, on a pilot basis, due to the urgent need to address the problem of high post-harvest losses across the country,” he stated.
The minister reported that all six marketing federations around the country were invited to submit proposals for their regions, which were evaluated by an independent review committee, and Sofanyama was selected as one of the successful federations.
Mamour Alieu Njie, project director, ROOTS, intimated that they are tasked, through the project to construct 15 cold storage facilities across the country. “So after a bit of background research, we concluded that the best way was to work with the marketing federation,” he said.
He further disclosed that they were in Soma last October and had a discussion with them to agree on the modalities after which they submitted a proposal that the National Review Committee found acceptable.
The ROOTS Project Director advised the beneficiaries that the storage facility is for them to manage sustainably.
“That is why we asked them to come up with a proposal and more importantly to make a counterpart contribution which amounts to 20% of the facility,” he concluded.
