By Fatou B. Cham
The Resilience of Organisations for Transformative Smallholder Agriculture Project (ROOTS) and the Department of Agriculture (DoA) recently reviewed the framework agreement between the two entities, held at ROOTS’ office in Abuko.
Speaking at the opening ceremony, Mamour Aliue Jagne, Director of ROOTS Project expressed gratitude for the level of collaboration and support the project is receiving from DOA. “Every collaboration has challenges but what is important is to have mechanisms in place where one can discuss and look into the achievements registered, challenges, and map a way forward to overcome some of those challenges,” he said.
The Director General of the Department of Agriculture, Saikou E. Sanyang noted the importance of meeting one of the project’s objectives of empowering smallholder farmers, by improving their food and nutrition requirements.
“The other objective is to have access to the market as we all know that one of the biggest challenges of our farmers is to have access to markets,” he added.
The main objective of the project is to reduce poverty at the household level therefore the ROOTS Project deemed it necessary to organize this meeting with DoA to review the field activities in the project intervention sites.
The DG reminded the gathering that the meeting is aimed at revisiting the framework and the MOUs that have been developed by the ROOTS Project in collaboration with the DoA.
According to Dr. Sanyang, DoA has a key role in two of the components of the ROOTS Project, one of which is agricultural productivity and adaptation to climate change. “It is our main function to collaborate with the project to see that the activity is being implemented on the right footing”.
He went on to emphasise that DoA has a role to play in the ‘access to a market’ component of the project; that the Agribusiness Unit has to collaborate with the agribusiness officer here to see how best they can get some of those strategies that would be useful to the smallholder farmers.
Mr Sanyang challenged the participants, who are mostly DoA Regional Directors and staff of the ROOTS Project, to be positive and to make constructive criticisms in order to add value to the exercise, saying “the ROOTS Project is not only for ROOTS but for the whole of The Gambia; we all have a stake in it. We need to team up to see what we can implement within the framework.”
He commended the project Director and team for strengthening the DoA by building the capacities of their extension workers which included the training of master farmers and facilitator training, through the focal points. This he noted has also eased the mobility issues by providing the Department with at least four vehicles and other forms of support.
