Help young lives learn how to farm in Africa

FALL - Winter 2022  REPORT

Organization: NETWORK OF AGRIC AND SUSTAINABLE LEADERS FOR AFRICA
(NASLAAFRICA)

NASLAAfrica supports and creates opportunities for youths and communities in Cameroon/Africa to grow healthy food, create jobs, and grow hope by:
• Organizing and hosting periodic workshops (classroom and on-the-farm training) for skills training and new ideas development for youths and farmers in sustainable agriculture, permaculture, and entrepreneurship
• Offering assistance with farm tools, and seeds and promoting a sustainable environment
management.
• improving smallholder farmers’ access to markets

This Annual Report/Review focuses on our ROOT Biz workshop. It is work that is more urgent than ever. The youths and communities we serve faced many challenges in 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic has continued to disrupt access to agricultural inputs, training, and markets, increasing poverty and hunger for farming families. The ongoing civil war in the English-speaking regions of Cameroon has continued to affect many businesses and schools leading to increase unemployment and challenges.

With your support, we have reached more than 500 youths and small-income farmers across 30 communities in Cameroon, helping them to tackle these challenges head-on and make a decent living from agriculture, while sustainably managing the natural resources around them.

As we write this report in December 2022, the challenges for youths and rural communities continue to escalate as the conflict in Ukraine has caused an increase in food prices in Cameroon.

We are grateful to the many individuals, organizations, faith-based ministries, institutions, and community groups locally and internationally who supported NASLAAfrica in 2022.

Activities or achievements
This section summarizes NASLAAfrica’s achievements in 2022 and outlines our goals for 2023. In the first quarter of 2022, we held an internal team meeting and hosted our first ROOT Biz workshop for the year 2022. This workshop took place in a very remote community of Bessi-formukong in the Mbengwi Subdivision. The workshop was focused on training livestock pig
farmers on organic feed formulation, health management, and marketing. The great strength of our ROOT Biz workshops this year was the recruitment of contract staff and volunteers who serve as resource trainers for these training. In the second and third quarters, we organize two workshops in Bamenda and in Mbengwi on indigenous poultry management and business development and on introduction to permaculture respectively in the above communities. Youths, students, and smallholder farmers from different communities in Cameroon benefited from this program. In Bessi-fomukong village, two farmers were supported with 100kg of compost pig feed.

We carried out 3 follow-up visits to our 15 participants. They all are doing wonderfully in their projects but are limited in similar challenges of lack of some basic tools, limitation in some skills areas, and access to quality seeds, and breeds.

We began arrangements to access land for the YAP center in Mbengwi. Good Feedback on this as of date is that NASLAAfrica has been offered partially donated land for the center. The full cost of the land is 9000 USD, with NASLA going to cover 5000 USD out of this sum.

Our ROOT Biz workshop for the last quarter of the year 2022 was postponed due to insecurity in the community where it was planned to hold.

In agriculture, our programs will continue to support youths and farmers to transition from chemicalized agriculture to sustainable, regenerative livelihoods. Access to quality inputs, tools, skills training opportunities, technology, and information improves income, increases food, and makes livelihoods more resilient.

Our goal for 2023, will be to lunch the Youth Agriculture and Permaculture (YAP) center project which will be a platform for skills training, education, research, permaculture gardens, food security, and demonstration in sustainable agriculture, entrepreneurship, and youth employment: We will emphasize the creation of job opportunities for young people throughout the value chain.

Food security: We will reignite youth and community engagement in sustainable agriculture and permaculture

Environment protection and Climate action: We will promote regenerative practices that help to heal the land and will work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen the resilience and the adaptive capacity of communities to climate change.

Gender equality: We will design our projects to be gender-sensitive and include meaningful outcomes for women’s economic empowerment.

Resilience: We will enhance youth and communities, enterprises, and ecosystems’ ability to mitigate and adapt to shocks.

Once more thanks to all our supporters, sponsors, and partners for your continues partnership toward the vision of NASLA to serve youths and communities.