areas of Intervention
- To build resilience and create wealth for women and youth, the key areas of intervention will be:
- Supporting women and youth to cultivate high value cash crops.
- Train and promote climate-smart agriculture to women and youth farmers.
- Establish a Youth Agri-preneurship Fund.
- Partner with TVET institutions to build skills linked to agricultural sector (mechanization, irrigation, processing, packaging etc) for women and youth.
- Provide targeted access to finance for women, through matching grants and other guarantees.
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- In line with the objective of mainstreaming the Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment bill, the Ministry of Agriculture is actively formulating a policy that places women at the forefront of all agricultural initiatives within the framework of the Feed Salone strategy.
Overview
Although women make up 70% of Sierra Leone’s labour force in the agricultural sector (Statistics Sierra Leone, 2018), they have significantly limited access to land title as compared to men. Land inheritance rights were only recently extended to women in the 2022 Customary Land Act and Land Commission Act, and the full implementation and benefits of these changes are yet to materialize (Bankolay,2023). Women still face limited access to land title. Consequently, women are less likely to own economic assets and are less involved in decision making about land use within their communities. In Sierra Leone, women combine taking care of children and other household chores with rearing animals, and other activities on the farm that are not likely to be income generating. As a result, they are more likely to earn less, be more impoverished and vulnerable to climate change and other shocks in the agricultural sector. Similarly, youth who make up about a third of the country’s population have remained largely on the fringes of the agricultural sector.
The National Agriculture Transformation Programme (NAT) 2023 acknowledges the marginalization of women and youths in the sector and underscores their ability of transforming the sector if they are empowered to realise their full potentials. This dual focus on women and youth is a clear manifestation of the government’s commitment to prioritizing these two vulnerable demographic groups, as also outlined in the National Development Plan (2019-2023). In line with the objective of mainstreaming the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment bill, the Ministry of Agriculture is actively formulating a policy that places women at the forefront of all agricultural initiatives within the framework of the Feed Salone strategy.