A €121 million loan to Senegal for the implementation of an emergency agricultural program, which will benefit 850,000 small farmers, including 35% of women, was approved by the board of directors of the African Development Bank Group.
According to Mohamed Chérif, the Bank’s country manager for Senegal, “Senegal’s dependency on the outside world for basic commodities and foodstuffs is a serious bottleneck and constitutes a threat to the country’s food sovereignty, which has been intensified by the war in Ukraine.”
“This operation is meant to minimize external financial, economic, social, and climatic shocks and to preserve the higher trend in cereal output witnessed in recent years,” he continued. “Key inputs, such as seeds and fertilizers, are available to producers.
This loan is the first to be authorized under the $1.5 billion African Emergency Food Production Facility, an effort of the African Development Bank to prevent a potential food crisis made worse by the conflict in Ukraine.
20 million farmers in Africa will get agricultural seeds thanks to the Facility, which was approved by the Board of Directors of the Bank Group on May 20.
The objective is to generate an additional 38 million tons of food, mostly wheat, maize, rice, and soybeans, worth $12 billion over the next two years.
The Emergency Food Production Programme consists of three parts: promoting governance and public policy execution in the agricultural sector; expanding farmers’ access to fertilizers; and improving access to certified seeds and advisory help.
The program will assist in supplying farmers with 15,000 tonnes of seed potatoes, 7000 tonnes of grain seeds, and 3000 tonnes of cowpea seeds under the first component.
Pre-basic seeds will also be made available thanks to a cooperative arrangement between the Senegalese Institute of Agricultural Research and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Equipment.
This will make it possible for at least 850 seed multipliers—25% of whom are women—to get basic seeds. In order to produce around 600,000 tonnes of grains (rice, maize, and millet), 120,000 tonnes of cowpea, and 150,000 tonnes of potatoes, nearly 350,000 more hectares will be planted.
The project’s second element will assist in the purchase of 118,000 extra tonnes of fertilizer in 2022 and 2023.
The implementation of a diagnostic study to revamp the fertilizer distribution system and enhance the agricultural input subsidy program will also be supported by this component.
Twenty percent of recipients of fertilizer—of whom 35% are women—will be the focus of a trial project to automate inputs.
The evaluation and updating of the nation’s Agro-Sylvo Pastoral Policy Law (2004-2025), the Letter of Agricultural Development Sector Policy (LPSDA 2019-2023), the validation of the Agricultural Programme for Food Sovereignty and Sustainability (2021-2025), and the creation of a national index/climate insurance program are all included in the third component.
30 projects totalling €2.37 billion were part of the African Development Bank Group’s active portfolio in Senegal as of 30 April 2022.