One of EU funded grantees under the Boosting Agriculture and Food Security Project (BAFS), Solidaridad West Africa and The Cotton Tree Foundation have completed a two-day digital mapping training session for fifty two (52) enumerators in Kenema District.
The training participants are made up of staff from service providers, and monitoring and evaluation officers from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. Participants are trained to accurately generate geopoints, and other relevant data like farm sizes to be able to undertake digital mapping exercises.
As part of the training exercise, participants visited a cashew farm to pre-test the digital mapping technology to ensure full understanding of the exercise and use of the tool.
The exercise will focus on identifying geolocations, validating the land acreage of 4,535 hectares of poly clonal cashew farms, 518 hectares of cocoa farms and 131 hectares of coffee farms as part of the efforts to develop a reliable database on tree crops cultivation in Sierra Leone.
This would enhance monitoring, resource allocation, and decision making by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Produce Marketing Board (PMB) and other stakeholders in the tree crop value chain.
The BAFS project since its inception in 2019 has supported the cultivation of 5,182 hectares of coffee, cashew and cocoa by 7,818 smallholder farmers across 12 districts in Sierra Leone and continues to encourage the adoption of cashew, cocoa and coffee value-chains in for a robust and sustainable agro-forestry sector.
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