High Value Agricultural Products Program (HVAP)

Solution

This project is improving livelihoods for women and promoting youth entrepreneurship. Also, the HVAP products we grow are healthy foods and ensure healthy lives as they are highly nutritional, medicinal and are good for all age groups.last but not the least, the program strives to alleviate poverty within indigenous farming communities and endeavors to promote food security and sovereignty in Cameroon through the growing of high value agricultural products using sustainable techniques.

This project is a community project as it involves local farmers. It will create more employment through its trainings as many more women and young people will be able to start processing these products and earn a living or improve their living standards. To measure this, I am aiming to work with at least a 270 women groups with at least 5 from each of the 54 communities in bafut. Also the machines used in grinding do not produce any smoke or waste just as our production process and raw material does not require the production of waste. therefore keeping our environment clean and safe.

Main activities I engage in include; training local farmers in the practice of permaculture, structure a local cooperative (BetterCOOP) to promote fair trade and limit middleman influence and to grow and transform our high value agricultural crops like ginger, turmeric, lemon grass, moringa, etc. into oils, teas and spices.     There are several products but the main product is ginger/tumeric tea and spice. To have this into a finished product, I purchase the ginger, wash and grate it. Once this is done, it is then dried in the sun and once dried passed through a machine for grinding. The ground ginger is then sieved and the fine grains are packaged as spice while the chaffs are packaged as tea. For the tumeric ginger, the fine grain is used both as tea and spice.

The High Value Agricultural Product (HVAP) program was designed within the remits of the Paris COP21 Agreements and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.  The hands-on trainings I offer to local farmers is improving livelihoods for women and promoting youth entrepreneurship (SDG 8). The HVAP products we grow is driving access to healthy food and ensuring healthy lives as they are highly nutritional and medicinal (target 3). The HVAP program strives to alleviate poverty within indigenous farming communities andendeavors to promote food security and sovereignty in Cameroon through the growing of high value agricultural products using sustainable techniques (SDG 1 and 2).

The Results

So far, this program is improving living standards of farmers where in up to 5 women groups with over 230 members through the Cooperative set up by Better World Cameroon as they are being trained on sustainable farming techniques and are taught to grow high value agricultural products using these techniques. The local cooperative (BetterCOOP) created by Better World Cameroon helps to sell these products by promoting fair trade and limiting middleman influence  thereby making the local farmers get what they deserve from international partners, shops and super market owners