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African Development Bank Group Vice President for Agriculture, Human and Social Development, Dr. Beth Dunford, has commended the government of Cote d’Ivoire for its delivery of a Bank-financed project improving rural population and youth living conditions.
The Government Social Program Support Project, or PA-PSGouv, has made strides through support for production and processing of agricultural products, improving access to basic social services, and facilitating youth access to the job market.
Dunford recently led a delegation from the Bank’s Agriculture, Human and Social Development Complex to visit “PA-PSGouv, in N’Douci, some 118 kilometers north of Ivory Coast’s commercial capital Abidjan.
The Bank financed $116.5 million for the project, which positively impacts some 3.5 million people in the sectors of youth and women skills development, employment and entrepreneurship, social protection, health, agriculture, fisheries, livestock, agro-industry, water and sanitation as well as infrastructure.
The delegation visited a cassava processing facility in N’Douci, one component of the larger PA-PSGouv program. With Bank financing, the Ivorian government-administered project introduced mechanization at the facility such as a cassava rasper crushing machine, dehydrator, and gas-powered steam cookers that reduce manual labor and scale up food production.
The facility is managed by an all-women cooperative that processes cassava into attiéké, a traditional West African dish made from fermented cassava that’s steamed into a couscous-like consistency. According to the cooperative’s leader, Sanata Coulibaly, the facility has almost doubled production to 3.6 million kilograms per year as a result of the project’s innovations. Attiéké produced is sold in domestic markets and in neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali, as well as purchased through public procurement to supply meals in Cote d’Ivoire’s prisons, hospitals and school feeding programs.
“We’ve seen tremendous impact…women employed, with access to mechanization to really improve and add value to the cassava value chain and produce the beloved attiéké of Cote d’Ivoire,” Dunford said.
What this project does is really take the means to increase production, increase commercialization, increase the ability. We want to take the true impact of this program and take it to scale across Cote d’Ivoire,” Dunford added.
PA-PSGouv also provides intensive business development training and support to women in agribusiness cooperatives, like Monique Kouakou Affouet. Affouet traveled 250 kilometers from the northern Ivorian city of Bouake to tell Vice President Dunford about how she used the project’s business development training to become a trainer herself, consulting to women-led cassava cooperatives in the region. Affouet also manages a semi-industrial cassava processing facility in Bouake.
“Before I entered the program, our facility was manually processing cassava. We could process 60 or 70 tons of cassava in a year. Since the project came to support us, we have been able to process up to 188 tons of cassava processing per year – and we think there is still a good margin for progression because we are looking for new investments and new markets,” Affouet said.
Led by its Human Capital, Youth and Skills Development Department, the African Development Bank is one of several development sector financial and technical partners supporting the program. The Bank’s Gender Marker System categorizes PA-PSGouv as “GEN II” – indicating that gender equality and/or women’s empowerment is one of the outcomes of the project, but not the principal outcome.
PA-PSGouv is designed around the development of social infrastructure and the strengthening of food security, youth employment and entrepreneurship, as well as information, education, and communication, studies and capacity building.
To date, some of the project’s achievements nationwide include:.
- training and equipping 5,685 small-scale cassava farmers (28.7 percent, women), 1,350 artisan fishermen and 422 rural women poultry farmers.
- establishing 88 fish farms and 500 poultry cooperatives.
- providing 4,642 poultry chicks to women poultry farmers in rural areas.
- supporting 1,375 small-scale market gardening farmers, 47.5 percent women, with production kits and essential farming equipment.
- placing 7,320 youth in pre-employment internships and training more than 3,100 youth in entrepreneurship.
Ringing a bell, wearing traditional make-up, and carrying a tune in her local language, one of the 17 women directly employed at the N’Douci cassava processing facility guided the Bank delegation to six center stations.
One station was preparing to store and break down cassava peels to be converted into biogas, an environmentally friendly, renewable energy source. The cooperative plans to use biogas to fuel cookers to steam the cassava.
Another station showcased products and women entrepreneurs that this cassava processing facility supports – tables stacked with packages of gari, a grain similar to attiéké, as well as cassava chips and other items.
In all, this one facility is providing economic and social opportunities more than a hundred women, says Non-Karna Coulibaly, Coordinator General of the PA-PSGouv program.
“The best way to measure the impact is to say that today, the women are now the ones in the households paying the bills. They are getting all the expenses for the household paid – sending the kids to school and paying school fees,” Coulibaly said of the financial independence the program brings.
“This project has allowed for the redistribution of the growth of the country,” Coulibaly added.