Women Farmers & UN Women Celebrate Successful Rice Farm Harvest In Karene

By Alfred Koroma

In Mabunduka Village, UN Women joined local women farmers for a jubilant symbolic harvest of 56 hectares of rice farmland on Saturday, 2nd November.
The land, cultivated through the support of UN Women, is the culmination of months of dedication and hard work by women in the Mabunduka Agro Farms Association in Karene District, Northern Sierra Leone.
“Who said Women cannot do it, let them come and see,” Head of Office, UN Women Sierra Leone, Setcheme Jeronime Mongbo said. “Women are even
more able than men. They can perform multiple tasks,” she said.
“We have to give women the opportunity to learn, to fail and then to succeed,” she added, hailing the women for driving such agricultural success in their
community. “I am very impressed. That is what we want.”
UN Women is the United Nations agency dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. The agency is working closely with women-led CBOs
like the Mabunduka Agro Farms Association and cooperatives to support the Government Feed Salone programme aimed at fostering food security in the
country.
The UN Agency has over the years supported the training of farmers on sustainable and climate-smart agriculture, and business development and management. It has also been providing quality seeds, green houses and irrigation farming equipment to women cooperatives across the country.
In addition to complementing the government Feed Salone program, the Head of UN Women said they are giving all these support to women farmers to improve their wellbeing, ensure they are economically independent, and help protect them from gender-based violence.
We want women at work, she said, urging authorities to provide more land for the women.
The symbolic harvesting of the 56-hectare rice farm brought together community stakeholders, local leaders, development partners and representatives from the government Ministry of Gender and Children’s Affairs and Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Food Security to celebrate the success of the women.
“This harvest is a testament to the strong support of the UN Women and partners and the hard work of the local women,” CEO of Mabunduka Agro Farmers, Adja Fatou Diop Ndiaye said.
“It has been more than 30 years now nobody planted in this whole area. So, you can imagine how exciting it is for our farmers,” she disclosed.
Adding that, it is not only about producing food it is about bringing hope to those who need it most the women and the young people. As part of the event, the team also visited MAFCBO cassava farm cultivated by the women led by Ndiaye.
She said the aim of their farming is to provide permanent jobs for the women and make them financially independent. This would be done by making sure they process those crops and provide the women more seeds individually to farm for themselves and provide them services with tractors.
“The goal is to get the women move from subsistence farming to commercial farming and get financial independence,” she said, arguing financial independence of women would end a lot of gender-based violence in rural communities.
The CEO of MAF CBO SL however highlighted the challenges they face as women farmers in the community, including access to finance, mechanization equipment and climate change.
“We are lucky, but the majority of the farms around got flooded this year,” she said, stressing the need for farmers to get insurance for those kinds of catastrophes.
Ndiaye thanked the UN Women and other partners for their support, saying in Karene, they are now supporting 700 women through the Association she leads.
“We thank the UN women for their support. They help us cultivate a big farm,”one of the beneficiaries, Kadiatu Sesay, an agro farmer said while speaking on
behalf of her fellow women.
“As women, we are ready to work to produce more food, so we are asking for more support,” she added.
Other stakeholders, including the Assistant Director, Ministry of Gender and Children’s Affairs, Joseph Dennis Koroma, Chiefdom Speaker, Abubakar Bangura and Fatmata Sillah from the Ministry of Agriculture also delivered statements at the event on Saturday, commending the support of UN Women to
the local female farmers.
Sillah said, as a government, they are seeing the effort UN Women and other partners are putting to ensure the government Feed Salone goal is achieved.