This was revealed on Tuesday as UNIDO exposed journalists to first-hand information about the ongoing onion productions at the Brefet Women’s Garden in the West Coast Region after the successful completion of the construction of the nation’s first-ever standard onion curing and storage facility in Foni.
The project is part of UNIDO’s West Africa Competitiveness Programme-The Gambia (WACOMP-GM) – which seeks to increase competitiveness through enhanced quality and compliance along the Onion Value Chain.
The project works with women to improve onion production; and one of the landmarks UNIDO had undertaken was the construction of the Curing and Packing Storage Facilities, which include the Brefet Women’s Garden.
The storage facility has the capacity to process over 20 tons of onions at a time with a storage capacity of 20 tons of onion at a time. UNIDO also equally provided the Brefet women onion producers with capacity building programmes on horticulture with the provision of empty onion bags for packaging, pallets and weighing scale.
Other facilities include Nanaba community in Central River Region-South and Jahuar Mandinka Community.
Speaking to journalists, Malamin Drammeh, the National Horticulture Value Chain expert for UNIDO component of WACOMP-GM project, said the project came to improve the competitiveness through quality and compliance of the onion value chain.
He noted that it’s a component responsible for the post-harvest for the best practices of onion. He explained that during the inception phase of the project, they conducted a rapid market analysis to study the onion value chain where they were able to identify the constraints and achievements at the farmer level through all the actors in the value chain.
He said that they were able to identify some constraints which they want to address for the farmers, describing one of the constraints as the management of onions after harvest. He said that before, onions were prematurely harvested and were neither dried nor cured.
He further revealed that initially there were no storage facilities, weighing at the production side or packaging materials, which prompted their decision to come up with the idea to improve the status for them to comply with all aspects of the onion value chain.
Karafanding Badjie, the president of Brefet Women’s Garden, commended UNIDO for their timely intervention. She revealed that they have gained relevant knowledge in onion production through capacity building programmes organised for them by UNIDO.
Other speakers include Ramatoulie Gigo, the director of Horticultural Services and Bakary Gassama, of the regional agriculture services for West Coast Region among others.
