Agriculture and livestock development project
“Moving from aid to production in Príncipe Island”
We are seeking for a grant to support this program. Please contact us if you are interested.
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This is a project to help small-holder farmers developing a competitive agriculture and livestock in Príncipe Island so that they could be able to live on their own activities.
It grows up around the organization and management of a plantation with 350 hectares whose profiteering was licensed to Ascendere by the Principe Government. The plantation will be organized in order to fulfill all the requirements for playing the role of a “Service Platform” for the agricultural development of the island. That platform will provide financial, material and technical support to the small-holder farmers so as they can farm their fields, increase diversification and competitiveness of agricultural and livestock productions, market their production surplus, and empower the economic activity to export.
From the fourth year of the project execution, the net financial income generated by the holding every year will be used to fund, over time, not only the agricultural project itself but also the second project – the creation of a private sector. Thus, it will become a self-sustaining development program.
While working with other doctors in Príncipe island, the close contact with the local rural communities brought us the knowledge of their extreme poverty while possessing a mild climate and fertile land with rainfall along almost the entire year. Not surprisingly, these are the basic essential requirements they need to become makers of their own destiny.
We realized that if we could start a program to help them farming their fields, increasing diversification and competitiveness of agricultural and livestock productions, creating domestic agro-forestry industries, marketing their production surplus, empowering the economic activity to export, giving them education and professional qualification, stimulating private sector development and creating new jobs, they will be able to break the chains of poverty and improve their living standards by themselves. Later, if they could find out by themselves the magic of music and the beauty of fine arts, we will be sure they are, at long last, living happily in one of the most beautiful and safest places in Africa. Why not to give a try?
We are convinced that the most efficacious way to successfully put forward the development of this community is helping them developing a competitive agriculture – the key sector of the economy – and creating a dynamic private sector, so that in the long term they have to depend on themselves rather to depend on aid. Finally, a well designed and credible project should be self-sustainable.
They need to be trained and guided to make a competitive agriculture, to make a sustainable exploration of their natural resources, to create a competitive and dynamic private sector and to develop an economy opened for the exterior. What they do not need is more charity.
We are seeking for a grant to support this program. Please contact us if you are interested.
