Dr Babagana Ahmadu, the country representative of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations in The Gambia, has expressed satisfaction over the commitment being demonstrated by rural Gambian women towards the TeleFoods projects.

The attitude of the women, he said, is a remarkable achievement for the projects, and he promised to continue working closely with them, and to support them in terms of capacity building to strengthen their projects and programmes.

The FAO projects are described as short term projects with 12 month duration. Within this period they are closely monitored, alongside strengthening of the capacities of the farmers in the interest of sustaining the projects. The profits are ploughed back. At the end of the twelve months, FAO is expected to hand over the projects to farmers, who will then be entirely responsible to ensure continuity of the program without any financial support from the former.

According to the FAO country boss, they will continue to offer technical support even after the twelve months. "So far, we have realised that the twelve months period is sufficient to have them capacitated to make the project sustainable," Dr Ahmadu said, adding: "So far we've not had any problem of sustainability. Our doors are open for any association of farmers who feel they can benefit from this kind of projects. They are free to approach us with proposals so that we can help them consolidate and mobilise resources for them to address their problems at the grass root level."

The FAO-sponsored Telefood projects which were launched in six different villages in the past one week, aim at addressing the problems faced by small groups, women associations, women farmers associations and the youths who are having problems in terms of accessing basic farming inputs like fertilizers, seeds and some basic tools. It has been largely fruitful, as all the communities involved have shown excitement about it.

Dr Ahmadu further disclosed that the FAO has within the last two weeks launched 10 projects in the whole country, amounting to over D2 million, aimed at empowering associations across the country. Expectations are that the capacity of the associations will be strengthened in terms of skills improvement, provision of material resources thus improving productivity, and thereby addressing the problems of hunger. "Our expectations are that these projects are going to meet the objectives for which they are set up. As you can see the farmers are very much hoping that this will go a long way in addressing some of their basic problems," the FAO country boss remarked.