Matching Grant Beneficiaries Praise Nema Project

Mr Musa Bah 

President of Bolongdala Rice Processing

The beneficiaries of the Matching Grant Facility, which is being provided by the National Agricultural Land and Water Management Development Project (Nema) have expressed heartfelt gratitude and appreciation to the Benefactor for supporting their various youth groups with processing and pressing machines.

Last month on 21^st June, 2019, fourteen youth groups across the length and breadth of the country received over sixteen rice, cereal processing and oil pressing machines through the Nema project Matching Grant Scheme at a presentation held at its office grounds in Abuko.

The Matching grant is designed to innovate, develop and build medium term financial services adapted to women and youth groups and individual-based Small and Medium Enterprises.

In an exclusive with, one of the beneficiaries of the machines, Ahagie Muya Baldeh, the president of Mbaalondiren Youth Development Association from Basse in Upper River Region commended the Nema project for the gesture, noting that the machines came at the right time as there is only one processing machine in their community which is owned by a Senegalese national.

Gambia Should Reduce Import Bills, Use the Dalasi to Import Cars- Banky Njie

Banky Njie Nema Business Dev Officer

 

“We have the land – about 60 percent of our land is underutilized, we have the people resources. Now, with the number of different projects – we also have the investments, whether its Nema’a asset financing scheme, or FASDEP’s version, or Reliance standalone “Farming as a Business”.

“So the opportunities are here to transform our activities to increase production, not only to feed ourselves, but also feed the world. We should have a vision to emulate our president and heed to his clarion call – ‘eat what we grow and grow what we eat’. We should then be able to reduce our import bills and use the hard currency to import that which we cannot produce – like cars…yet!! We cannot talk about our dignity if we don’t have the ability to feed ourselves.

“Let us all believe and have a sense of pride in what we produce and get out of our mindsets that anything imported, especially from the West, is better,” said Banky Njie Business Development Officer for the International Fund for Agricultural Development, IFAD financed project in The Gambia the National Agricultural Land and Water Management Development Project (Nema)

Nema Business Development Officer was delivering a statement on the closing of the 4 day Entrepreneurship training to smallholder producers & actors in the rice & vegetable value chains at Jenoi, Thursday 13^th March 2014.

Nema project training on 80 start-up businesses of women and youth on entrepreneurship

Participants at the training

The National Agricultural Land and Water Management Development Project (Nema) the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) financed project gathered 80 start-up businesses of women and youth from the 24^th to 27^th February, 2014 at Rural Farmers’ Agricultural Training Centre at Jenoi in Lower River Region.

The 80 start-up businesses participants are selected after the project embarked on country-wide trekking identifying potential business[s] based on demand from the beneficiaries themselves by filing Nema request forms. With the volume of participants, the training has been split into two groups 40 participants for each training session to be conducted by Concern Universal (CU).

Speaking at the official opening ceremony, Mr. Momodou Gassama Nema project director said that the Gambia government has seen IFAD’s intervention and support in the country as ‘timely’ noting that Nema project seeks to build on the achievements of IFAD’s previous projects-LADEP and PIWAMP with an added important component: Agricultural Commercialization; which seeks to graduate subsistence farming to commercialization-producing more that what we eat, to sell for profit.