Held at the Senegambia hotel, Lumana Kamashi of the European Union stated that the project is designed to strengthen the competitiveness of West Africa and to enhance the countries’ integration into the regional and international trading system.
She added that it is currently being implemented in the ECOWAS member states and for each country, priority value chains have been identified and the type of the activities selected involves a combination of technical assistance, training, coaching, equipment, and studies.
“WACOMP Gambia aims at strengthening the onion value chain while supporting over 21, 000 vegetable growers in the five agricultural regions through the marketing federations,” she said.
Ebrima Sisawo, permanent secretary at MOTIE, said the opportunities are in the country but certain issues require urgent attention and need fixing. He added that one of them is post-harvest losses and capacity building for women farmers.
“When we are able to fix these two things, we should comfortably provide our local vegetables and even export some of these items. A lot of onion was produced this year but marketing was a challenge. With the intervention of the ministry, we were able to engage major onion importers to link them with local producers.”
PS Sisawo further emphasised that capacity building for women farmers is critical and needs to be enforced in the area of post-harvest handling, packaging, the ability to communicate, and the preservation of their items. When these are addressed, he said, the country should be able to provide for most of its needs, saying “we have the land, soil, and people’s willingness.”
“We should graduate from importing vegetables because we have the capacity. We need to fix the technical issues in order to locally produce adequate vegetables for our markets and beyond.”
Fatou Janneh Touray, deputy permanent secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture also explained that WACOMP comes to alleviate the agricultural value chain, especially in the area of onion. She said the project is supporting women's gardens and marketing federations in order to add value to onions and link them to market.
“The project is extended to other products like cashew, sweet potato, orange and is expanding more.”
In helping women with storage and market, she said, her ministry has an $80 million roots project, adding it has a storage facility component.
He reiterated that the ministry would build one storage facility in each region in order to manage post-harvest losses.
“The private sectors are also coming up in building storage facilities. In terms of the market, we have the agric business sector at the ministry which is in the process of transformation as a cooperative department that will bring cooperatives together in order to help alleviate the challenges faced by farmers."
