- Alfred Fornah/ Vidal Sesay
CASSAVA'S CLIMATE CHANGE CONTRIBUTION!
Wow! This cassava farm is big! We're visiting Sanda Magbolontor Chiefdom to witness first-hand how one Sierra Leone farming organization is harnessing the power of innovative volunteerism to empower rural women, boost the chiefdom's food security, improve nutrition and help these farming communities adapt to climate change.
On closer inspection make that a Cassava and Cashew Nut Farm - more than 600 cashew saplings from the World Food programme growing alongside the cassava! And all this from scratch in just six short months.
Diaspora volunteer Mo explains the importance to rural farmers in diversifying their crops:
"These are highly nutricious crops and by diversifying into drought-resistant cassava and cashew our farming villages can adapt to extreme weather events caused by climate change.
And when the cassava and cashew are ready in another couple of years, as well as boosting local nutrition, our farmers livelihoods will significantly improve as they add value locally processing the cassava into nutricious gari, foo-foo and flour"
Andrew, Hope Sakuma farm coordinator, tells us how they broke ground on the new cassava farm just six months ago in May; back-breaking clearing and cleaning land - not farmed since before the civil war - all the way from the Port Loko junction towards Mannays. Seven villages working together to create this beautiful bountiful vista from scrubland, each team responsible for tending and profiting from their own patch of nutritious cassava.
Mo praises Andrew's dedication, planning and leadership in delivering this project in just six months and on something of a shoe-string of a budget:
"Andrew's really done such an amazing job. This great endeavour is only made possible by these men and women's dedication and incredible hard work - imagine all this land, as far as the eye can see, all cleared and cleaned by hand, tilled by hand, dug into these fine heaps by hand and then cared for and weeded all by hand."
"We may well be cash-poor but we are all heart-rich harnessing the power of innovative volunteerism - country men and women working hand-in-hand with diaspora volunteers returning home, each bringing different and unique skills to help found this sustainable farm."
Chatting to these farmers we find they know a lot about sustainability already - crops are rotated to maintain soil and plant health and inter-planted with nutritious potato leaf to reduce weeding and retain moisture in the soil and drought-resistant cashew, which gets tended at the same time. Mo explained how:
"Hope Sakuma were so lucky to get six farmers, including the first women, trained by the District Agricultural Office on a sustainable agricultural programme developed by JIKA the Japanese NGO."
And Hope Sakuma have taken it further with farmer commitments to farm only previously farmed land; not to cut down old trees or medicine trees to protect our rich bio-diversity and not to introduce pesticides helping protect and maintain soil health.
