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Sierra Leone secures $50m to boost agriculture and tackle poverty

The Government of Sierra Leone is to receive an additional $50 million to help lift its small-scale farmers out of poverty. The money comes from the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), a new fund established through pledges made at the G8 Summit in L’Aquila to tackle global hunger and poverty, and will support a new Government programme to help small-scale farmers move from subsistence farming to ‘farming for business’.

Sierra Leone has made enormous strides since emerging from a decade-long civil war in 2002 but remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with 70% percent of the population living below the poverty line and close to half the population falling into periods of hunger. 40 percent of children under five are chronically undernourished. 

President Ernest Bai Koroma (pictured above) has made improving agricultural productivity one of the top priorities of his Government and central to the fight against poverty and food insecurity. The new Smallholder Commercialisation Programme will help farmers raise their incomes by increasing crop yields, processing more of what they grow, and marketing their product more effectively. It will also fund irrigation systems and feeder roads, improved access to finance and social protection measures.

Over the next five years the programme will help take over 80,000 farming families - some half a million people - out of poverty through the provision of seeds, fertiliser and machinery, as well as improved access to markets. The programme will help lift the growth rate of agriculture from its current rate of 4.2 percent to over 7 percent,  and to put Sierra Leone on track to meet its Millennium Development Goals. 

The Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative, of which Mr Blair is the Patron, has been supporting the Government of Sierra Leone on the planning and implementation of the Smallholder Commercialisation Programme.

Tony Blair praised the announcement, saying: 

“One of the biggest challenges facing Sierra Leone is how to give the millions of its people whose livelihoods depend on agriculture the practical support they need to lift themselves out of poverty. Fortunately, the Government now has a clear and credible plan for how it is going to do that, and I am delighted that the international community is rallying behind it.”