Welcome to Project Food First |
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Project Food First is a non-profit, non-religious and non-political organization founded in 1992 and working at community level in the rural areas of The Gambia by providing technical, promotional assistance and voluntary services, to women working with the production of vegetables. You can read more in the history of the organization... Nowadays, the organization has developed diverse programme activities all geared towards the same objective in promoting the cultural diversity of the country.
In the developmental activities that we do undertake women organization are given the highest priority in our operations in the country. Here below is a picture of one of the women watering the vegetable garden in Katakorr Village, South Gambia.  Even in the area of education and number of schools in the village, I was told by the secretary of the village, that a nursery school was built by the villagers, to partly give children the opportunity to have a place to go and learn something directly preparing them to start school in the coming years.. This was the main reason why a village nursery school was built and when we visited the school, I was very impressed by the children, who were very interested in the work we planned to do in the village. The nursery school is allocated with technical support through video promotional clips that were used to exhibit the works of the villagers to the outside world. The nursery school has also been partly involved in our advertisement campaign that might help them find sponsorship to extend the school due to the increasing number of children in the village who have no access to a school place.
The village has no electricity supply but the village mosque was equipped with a small Solar Energy aggregate that could supply the nearby houses and the street with electricity during the night. Because of these diverse problems a new working strategy was developed and funds were applied for the continuation of the selected projects, such as the acquisition of Solar Panels for the village garden. In order to resolve the problem of energy supply in terms of electricity in the future, we adopted an expansion strategy in our activities including other areas such as ecotourism, Fair Trade, multimedia and social projects with youths in the suburban areas of the Greater Banjul Area. These activities were deemed necessary to stimulate and motivate people, after our careful study of the socio-economic status of the majority of the people in the country. Diverse programmes and significant projects with positive socio-economic impacts and directives, to improve the livelihood of underprivileged, were regarded as most urgent and this was found to be complementary to the future work we intend to pursue in the country. Even ecotourism as an activity was started complementing the activities of GM Tourism, an ecotourism organization founded and registered in Sweden, which was purposely formed to contribute in the environmental and cultural orientation of locals and tourists, about the importance of environmental conservation, the protection of the wildlife and fauna along the sources of the river Gambia and inland. Because of this new approach tourists are guided to visit very attractive ecotourism resorts spread around the country. It is widely accepted within the mist of most stakeholders in the tourist industry that tourism and culture are closely related and can be termed as cousins in this context and to mark this fact, the administration of the Food First organization, has developed this concept by incorporating the cultural aspect in our activities with international painting exhibitions, festivals, music concerts, drama and theater, and the selling of artistic materials of various kinds. Another area that interests us is internal cross-cultural communication, allowing the movement, mingling of people from various cultural backgrounds, with the objective to create Peace and maintain stability and cordial relations between people and nations in around the world. Through International student exchange programmes, there is the possibility to bring people together from various countries to mingle and exchange ideas, thereby building the bridge to mutual respect and understanding between people. International Cultural Exchange Programmes Various kinds of international cultural exchange programmes addressing cultural issues significant to uphold global cultural harmony between people bring peace and friendly relations amongst various people from different parts of the world. These international cultural programmes do range from student exchange, cross-cultural communication between different groups from different countries, international festivals addressing global issues affecting the existence of mankind on this planet. Festivals addressing climate change, denouncing terrorism against the civil populations around the world, advocacy for the equal distribution of world resources to disadvantaged people around the Sub-Saharan part of Africa. To
complement the work we were doing in The Gambia, a Media Studio was
put in place to make the documentation of our projects much more easier.
The media studio is called the Virtual Studio, media section of Project Food First. The Media Section created purposely to render technical assistance to other organizations, that need help to expose their activities in the mainstream society. Even individual artists, companies, organizations and government parasatals are a few partners that we collaborate with in the past five years in The Gambia. Since the media section was created various types of media publications including newsletters, music video clips, duplication of music albums and many more are requested from us by the public. |
In the African village setting ethnic groupings living side by side, some from the same group or another group, with social structures based on kinship relations, ethnicity and blood band is highly exercised but nowadays, new administrative procedures were introduced upgrading the quality of leaders at local level. Local governance is handed over to Alkalos and governors of districts and regions. The Alkali of the Village is always traditionally appointed through inheritance but nowadays Akalis are appointed by government in order to break the traditional system of hereditary and give chance to other competent citizens of the country who are more engaged in the administration and development of the area in which they are signed to administer. The Alkali acquires the highest political position in the village followed by other elders in the village committee, which comprises both men and women. In Africa
the role of elders are highly recognized when it applies major
decisions affecting the life of the villagers. Besides the Alkali of the village who is the supreme person responsible of the politics of the village in collaboration with the villagers, there are other institutions such as the church, operating in the area of social work through sponsorship of the only nursery school for pre-school children. The women of the village are engaged in their organization called Katakorr´s womens organization. Their main activity is growing food and caring the children. There is a village garden under the full control of the womens organization and functions as the working place for almost all the women in the village.
The Alkali, the Elders Committee and the womens horticultural organization, co-partners of the Food First Organization, agreed on the 1st January 2007, to initiate and give full technical support to the development projects in the village. Most of the projects at village level were under the control of the women. The community based projects comprise of various activities from vegetable gardening to honey and salt making. The village community projects were the main targeted areas in our operations, mainly to help them protect the crops from the roaming goats and also find ways and means of getting them Solar Panels, to supply them with the electricity they require in the garden. The only practical way to help the villagers was to intervene with the knowledge and technical possibilities, that can expose the collective work they were engaged in for the past years.
The Community based Projects in Katakorr Main objective of the womens' organization The main objective of the project is the acquisition of durable energy source such as Solar Panels to supply the village with electricity, which is non-existence and also put into place water pumps in the village garden which harvested 20 tons of unions last year...read more in the history of the Food First Organization. We were not only looking at how to work towards food security in the village but also how to improve the level of education of the villagers. An experiment was engineered to document the family settings in the village,by involving the family members of each household, to make a Embroidery in the form of visual arts, which was later to be used in an exhibition in Uddevalla, Bohuslän, Sweden. The projects we have in the village range from local honey and salt making,horticultural activities, environmental upgrading through fruit tree planting, ecotourism and birdwatching. 
The main purpose of our involvement is mainly to expose the idea and the work invested in these projects through media documentation that can be exhibited from other people in the surrounding communities and abroad. The second reason is our demonstration of solidarity with rural populations who are left behind in the development process and the need to give them the financial and moral support that is lacking in the present society. Advocacy for better prices for the produce of small scale farmers is our parole and we believe that through these means farmers can have better pay from capital strong international companies abroad. The administration of Project Food First will continue with the meager resources available to help in the development of the living standard of marginalized populations in the country. FAIR TRADE - is a way to get a fair price of our products African
small scale producers have in the past years lost the most part of
their incomes to outside markets that take most of the profit. The low
prices paid to African farmers for their produce in the international
markets do not favour the local economy of most African producers.
Therefore to be a member of an organization such as WFTO, World Fair
Trade Organization in Nairobi, Kenya can be a great move to render
political and moral support to those farmers who are permanently
exploited by organized international cartels around the globe. We do Fair Trade in cultural products. Most of these products are handmade as there are no modern industries besides the tourism industry gaining the sizable amount in investment volume from other partners abroad.  Ninety percent of the amount of money collected from these activities are recycled in the projects we are managing in the country. The village of Katakorr in Foni Bintang, South Gambia, has been identified as an ideal place to work with the philosophy of the Food First Organization because we can practice not only growing vegetables but also encourage the development of ecotourism, and the construction of ecolodges around the river banks |
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