The initiative is part of the project dubbed Resilience of organizations for transformative Smallholder Agriculture (ROOTS) financing for producers and small medium enterprise SMEs.
Organized by GCCI as the lead implementing partners of ROOTs, the project was held at Coco Ocean hotel. The day’s meeting was designed to meet and discuss with stakeholders on the opportunities available at the Roots project to ensure that the SMEs have access to matching grant at Roots project.
Addressing the gathering, Sarata Conateh, Chief Executive officer GCCI, expressed delight and with the turnout of participants representing various financial service providers.
The move, she said, show the commitment and dedication of participants toward the development of the country’s agricultural sector.
She however, challenged participants to make the dialogue interactive and educative, challenging participants to ask as much as possible to clear the doubts.
For his part, Lamin S. Darboe, senior climate smart agriculture officer at the Roots project, described the session as important in the realization of their target objective.
“The roots project as you may be aware is a six-year project under the Ministry of Agriculture and is here to support production and marketing of value change commodities in the Gambia.”
The project, he added, would also go further to ensuring that there is market for smallholder farmers in the country.
This, he added, is the reason why the project is also sign as a value change project where there are opportunities along the value change from the producer’s level to other actors within the value change like the processors and the transporters.
“So it is a means of bringing stakeholders within the project design.”
