Close to 20,000 rural poor farmers across Africa will receive training and enterprise support following a decision by the Jersey Overseas Aid Commission (JOAC) to back three new Self Help Africa projects.

JOAC has awarded almost £400,000 for development projects in in Togo, Kenya and Malawi. This follows earlier JOAC grants to Self Help Africa work in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo, Malawi, Uganda and Zambia.

The recent grant announcements will provide three-year funding to a project to support more than 16,000 people in remote Northern Togo, will assist 1,800 households on a poultry enterprise in Kenya’s Rift Valley province, and provide training and support to 500 farmers engaged in pigeon pea production in Southern Malawi.

The largest new grant will invest almost a quarter of a million pounds over three years in a Self Help Africa scheme that is helping 3,300 households in the Oti,Tandjoare and Tone districts of Northern Togo to increase cereal and rice production through farmer-based seed multiplication.

The project is also assisting farm families with a range of other sustainable farming activities, and is supporting households with methods for processing and marketing their produce.  The project specifically targets women farmers for support.

JOAC has also awarded £94,500 to assist 1,800 farming households in Nakuru County, Kenya to develop successful poultry enterprises through training in chicken rearing, marketing and enterprise development over two years.  And grant-support of £65,000 from the Commission will fund training of 500 farmers in Balaka District, Malawi in the production and marketing of early maturing varieties of drought-tolerant pigeon pea.