Fatou Jammeh Touray, Deputy Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture
By Fatou Sillah
The World Food Programme (WFP), in collaboration with its partners, held a validation workshop on Monday to review the findings of a Value Chain Assessment and market studies.
The study, conducted by SMD Policy Management Group, focused on key crops such as rice, cowpeas, millet, groundnuts, and oranges across all agricultural regions of The Gambia. The event, hosted at a local hotel in Kololi, is part of WFP’s Home-Grown School Feeding Programme, which seeks to bolster local agriculture while addressing food security and educational outcomes.
The Home-Grown School Feeding Programme is a flagship initiative of the Gambian government and WFP. It leverages locally sourced food to provide nutritious meals to students, aiming to alleviate food insecurity, improve education, and empower local farmers by creating direct links between schools and agriculture.
Speaking at the workshop, Fatou Jammeh Touray, Deputy Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, stressed the importance of diversifying The Gambia’s agricultural production. She highlighted that achieving rice self-sufficiency does not equate to overall food self-sufficiency.
“Rice self-sufficiency is not be food self-sufficient, we can be rice self-sufficient as a country and be food insufficient, because we all know, we have a culture, Tradition in this country though we are considering rice as our stable food, but we still have some cultures that are using other commodities different from rice and this need to be developed and needs to be encouraged. WFP has been doing well in this country since in the 70s we all enjoyed their nutritious hot meals in Schools,” she said.
The Deputy Country Director of WFP in The Gambia emphasized the broader impact of the Home-Grown School Feeding Programme.
“The in grown school feeding program is a platform that can really help to fix the food system here in The Gambia, and is not to make sure that, the linkage is well organized. We need to support the school but as well support the farmers in terms of organization, in terms of having the right inputs in place, having the right practice and adapt to the current situation the country is facing. Gambia is really exposed to climate change, which is affecting the Agricultural sector,” He stated.
Omar A. Bah, Senior Education Officer at the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education, highlighted the dual benefits of the program for students and farmers.
“I would like to emphasize the importance of home-grown school feeding, which WFP is currently implementing in four of our regions. Namely, north bank region, CRR north and south and URR, the importance of home-grown school feeding, we all know it increases the production capacity of our farmers especially small farmers and when the production is increased it is going to increase the local economy instead of buying outside, we buy from our own farmers before enriching other farmers we need to enrich our own,” he explained.