Solutions

Global food production faces great challenges in the future. With a future world population of 9.6 billion by 2050, rising urbanization, decreasing arable land, and weather extremes due to climate change, global agriculture is under pressure. While today over 50% of the world population live in cities, by 2030, the number will rise to 70%. In addition, global emissions have to be kept in mind. Currently, agriculture accounts for around 20–30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Shifting food production to locations with high demands reduces emissions and mitigates climate change. Urban horticulture increases global food production by exploiting new locations for cultivation. However, higher land prices and urban pollution constrain urban horticulture. Today, urban communities are more engaged in infrastructural projects, such as constructing houses, factories and other business. Considering the high cost of land and its unavailability for agricultural purposes, the access to healthy and enough food remain challenge in the urban communities.

Sierra Leone has abundant natural resources, good rainfall and vast acres of land suitable for a variety of agricultural products. Yet Sierra Leone has ranked bottom of the Human Development Index for the past five years and is seen by some of its development partners as a fragile State, whose legacy of war continues to cast a shadow over its future. One of the major causes of this challenge its as result of the poor or no support received by the rural communities to help them produce large quantity of vegetable and create a market friendly environment for their products. It’s evident that, the limited rural farmers who produce vegetables little above the needs of their families also face challenge to access to market .To help urban populations increase access to healthy and sustainable food ( vegetables), our solution envisages to address this problem in the following ways:

• Provide requisite supports: Our plan for the provision of requisite reports to vegetable farmers producers including: (A) seeds
  we plan to support rural farmers with variety of seeds that enable them cultivate large scale of vegetables that will be sold to the enterprise owners in the urban communities. This will accelerate the availability and accessibility of vegetables into the cities and towns.
• Provide support rural vegetable farmers with storage facilities: One of the huge challenges face by rural farmers in Sierra Leone is the problem of storage facilities. The able vegetable producers produce less quantity even in the means where one has the capacity to produce more. They are fear of exposing their products to pests which will create harms to their operations. With definition, the storage facilities under this solution cover: construction stores, packeting facilities cooling facilities with others.
• Create access to transportation for rural farmers to the urban communities. In Sierra Leone, most of the places where vegetable are produced in the country are far away to the cities or urban communities. Farmers face huge challenges in transporting farm products from their farms to the cities. Using commercial or public transportation with no passenger segmentation affect perishable agricultural products before reaching in the cities.
• Provision of chemical: our solution plans to support vegetable farmers with the necessary chemicals such as fertilizer, pesticides that will boost the production of vegetables and helps urban communities to have access to healthy and sustainable for food from now to 2030.
• Support farmers with market linkage: farmers in sierra Leone generally lack the support that will link them market for the realizations of product profitability. With this, majority only embark on the production of small scales that this fit to serve farming environment. As we plan, this solution will empower farmers by linking then directly to the markets.
• Value chain – our solution will ensure that farmers add innovative values to vegetable produces before reaching to the market. Part of the value chain will capture packeting the products at the fields.

Drainage and irrigation facilities : one of the major challenges face by farmers in Sierra Leone that are responsible for the limited productionof farm products to make it available to the urban communities is that they lack the capacity that enable them practice continuouscrops production. This happens so because some of the key elements that will accelerate massive production of vegetables such as irrigation for continuous water supply are totally lacking in their daily practices.This limits their capacity of supplying larger quantity of products to the cities. For for this solution, we plan to empower vegetable producer farmers with the necessary water supply facilities that will empower them to adapt continuousvegetable production and supplying of the cities.