The Pirang Mixed Farming Centre is one of 25 centres set up by the Ministry of Agriculture across the country. It is used by the Department of Agriculture as a model training centre, as well as to provide extension services on good farming, cooperative and governance practices to farmers, particularly young people and women.
These centres have been inactive for the past two decades, but the Ministry has undertaken to rehabilitate them. The Pirang mixed farming centre is one of twelve rehabilitated centres. Its main objective is to build farmers' capacity to diversify their livelihoods into income-generating activities in order to build a resilient community capable of bouncing back in the event of a disaster using its own capacities and resources.
With the support of the Ministry of Agriculture, the Centre is training staff and extension agents to help, advise and train farmers to adopt sustainable farming techniques that are resilient in the face of climate change.
Thanks to support from the ECOWAS AEP, the Centre aims to broaden its skills and areas of action in agroecology by providing its various target groups with a centre with enhanced skills for training and the dissemination of knowledge and good practice.
The project will be implemented through 4 main activities:
- To build human resources capacity
- To improve the quality of training and increasing the annual number of agroecology trainees
- To improve the center's infrastructure
- To improve teaching equipment and materials
General objective: To contribute to job creation, improve food and nutritional security, increase incomes and facilitate the empowerment of women through the adoption of an agroecological production system to mitigate environmental and forest degradation and urban-rural and irregular migration.
Specific objectives
01.02.03.04.The implementation of the actions proposed for the project will be managed by the focal points together with the Regional Director of Agriculture and the Head of Monitoring and Evaluation at the Ministry of Agriculture.
Centre managers/staff will lead implementation at the Pirang Mixed Farming Centre and in the central area of Kombo East District in collaboration with the West Coast Regional Directorate of Agriculture. Frontline facilitators/village extension officers and trained agricultural facilitators for women, youth and people with disabilities will lead and facilitate implementation at the field/village community vegetable garden level.
Trained members of the multi-disciplinary facilitation team at community level will be actively engaged in all activities and will lead those that require their technical expertise, such as supporting extension services on agriculture and agri-food, ecology, forestry, livestock, beekeeping, wildlife, gender, climate change, disaster management, farmer organisations, research issues, etc.
Outcome 1
- The centre's infrastructure will be improved, including training rooms, dormitories for learners, a biogas production unit and solar drilling
Outcome 2
- The Centre's teaching materials and equipment are being improved and the integrated production system is being set up via experimental and demonstration training units
Outcome 3
- A training needs assessment is carried out and agroecology training programmes are developed, centre staff and managers, extension agents and producers (including women and young people) are trained via school fields, and a participatory analysis of vulnerability in the community of the kitchen garden programme in the target beneficiary village is carried out
Outcome 4
- The knowledge and skills of 3 agents/managers of the Centre, 2 agents of the Regional Directorate of Agriculture, 10 agents of the technical services and 4 members of the MDFT on the principles and practices of agroecology are strengthened through the training of trainers; the knowledge and skills in agroecology of extension agents and front-line vegetable producers are strengthened through the training of facilitators and 5 community vegetable garden projects in beneficiary villages are supported
