The Board of Directors of the African Development Fund on Monday 12 December 2022 announced the approval of $12.16 million in additional grant funding for the Rice Agro-Industrial Cluster Project in Sierra Leone.
The project was first approved in November 2021. The Sierra Leone Rice Agro-Industrial Cluster (SL RAIC) Project, in the rural floodplain areas of Pujehun and Bonthe Districts of Sierra Leone, will help advance GoSL’s renewed commitment to sustainably transform the agricultural sector, under its New Direction Agenda and the National Agricultural Transformation Program (NAT 2023).
The SL RAIC project is needed to address a major and traditional production challenge of reliance on floating rice cultivation in one of SL’s major rice production areas by introducing solutions that allow for dry-season, modern cultivation and processing of quality rice.
The key expected outputs of the Project include more than 3-fold per hectare, increase in Rice production figures (currently 1-5-2.0 tons/ha), commercialisation of rice production and increased wealth for rice producing communities. The SL RAIC Project will be implemented over five years at a total cost of UA 23.29 million.
The new tranche, to be sourced from the 2022 Performance-based Allocation, will fill a funding gap in the project’s total cost of nearly $37 million.
In addition to bringing the country toward rice self-sufficiency, the project is improving the livelihoods of rural households by extending quality inputs, land and water management, mechanization and extension services to farmers to increase rice production.
The project is also improving the value chain through rice processing and promoting the consumption and marketing of locally processed rice.
In July 2022, the African Development Bank approved a grant of $1.92 million to boost food production in Sierra Leone under its African Emergency Food Production Facility (https://bit.ly/3wGWi3O), a response to a looming global food crisis that resulted from the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
