National Women Farmers' Association (NAWFA), has taken it upon itself this year, with the support of AcionAid, to embark on a five-year Hunger Free Campaign through land development and food production across the country.

Njagga Jawo, director of NAWFA, has said in an interview with Daily Observer at his office during the weekend, that the main aim of the advocacy for land development and productivity campaign is to ensure that female members of each village have access to development and production inputs to become more productive.

He said the specific objectives are to solicit the support of all local authorities and landowners, to provide NAWFA women's groups in the villages with adequate and permanent access to quality farmland for all their members (a minimum of 0.25 ha per member), ensure that all land acquired are developed in the name of the women's groups in each village, develop a land management plan to ensure proper land resource management and effective investment through a participatory process, solicit support of policy makers to put in place appropriate policies to facilitate women's guaranteed access to production inputs and credit, provide the women with adequate funds either as a grant or a revolving loan to implement a land development support project for sustainable and profitable use of the land acquired, provide production inputs to the women including credit for better production and productivity and also to provide women with the requisite group management knowledge and skills required to better run their organisation and achieve their objectives.

He also noted that for the women farmers, they are well known for their efforts with regards to food production particularly when it comes to household food production. NAWFA Boss said that about 80% of the food produced in the house is produced by women, adding that the women owned 10% of the land where these food crops are cultivated on. He also said that food self- sufficiency is an issue that The Gambia has taken up and  "we as an NGO trying to complement government's efforts in order to ensure that every Gambian gets adequate food as the basis for the hunger free campaign," he said.

"For this year, we are embarking on a series of activities regarding this hunger free campaign, one of which is a series of activities with regards to the land advocacy campaign that we were on for the previous two years. We also had a series of activities with governors, chiefs, landowners and key people or authorities that are concerned with land. We have already succeeded in meeting with most of the governors in the rural areas.

We are trying to make sure that land is allocated to women not just in the form of access but also ownership, ownership of and by women have been perceived as inadequate and that has gone a long way in hindering programmes with regards to food production, since the women are the sole producers of food in this country," he said.

The NAWFA boss went on: "We are embarked on a regional workshop where we met all the governors countrywide or most of them and we also have regional workshop where we met our regional groups with chiefs. We met with at least 90% of them and spoke to them about support at that level for the communities. We also have village cluster farming campaign meetings where we met the village group representatives from all sectors of society."

He added that they have just concluded a countrywide tour, which is part of the land development through production, when they reached to every region in the country, adding that in each region, they tried to identify a particular village, of course, through community participation, "We want to identify a particular village in every region where we are going to cultivate a minimum of 5 hectares. We will give support with regards to seeds such as maize, rice, groundnut, sesame or other forms of seeds depending on what the people want. We will provide other forms of support including clearing, fertilizer, tractor ploughing and seedlings since we are going to use them for fencing in these areas that are identified in each region.

The process is now on, some villages have already completed identification of their sites, and we have started providing support. We also provide technical support in collaboration with Agricultural ministry, who are the major stakeholders in that area," he said "We have what we call the farmers field school, where we will provide training for the farmers; from planting, clearing, production to processing. In this field, we aim at providing or implementing what we call integrated crop and livestock production, whereby we are going to produce various crops and various livestock, mainly small ruminants for women and of course practice sustainable agriculture, which is the emphasis. When I say sustainable agriculture, I mean we are going to practice what we call Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture (LEISA), which we are going to use in the promotion of food production in these areas. We are trying to work towards complementing government's efforts with regards to contributing towards food security," Njagga added.

He noted that the constraints we normally face is lack of adequate land, adding that the process has been delayed because not many villages he said could provide them a minimum of 5 hectares due to the land tenure system problem, because land in many places is not readily available to the women in those villages. "So that has given us a big constraint with regards to starting the program because, the two places where we have at least 5 hectares are where we are trying to work with to ensure that we give them the necessary support," the NAWFA boss concluded.