Giving the overview of Solidaridad, the Country Representative Nicholas Jengre said that they launched their legend project in Sierra Leone in 2016 with the objective to facilitate enabling policies on land governance by ensuring that land acquisition procedures support large scale agricultural investor National Habitats (NH).

According to Jengre the legend project has made significant progress in creating awareness on land governance issues across eight (8) chiefdoms in line with the NLP recommendations and food security status of beneficiaries at optimal levels.

“We have trained over 900 farmers and helped 20 women groups with village saving loan access,” Jengre said.

He cited that they introduced two new projects in January this year, stating that Sustainable West Africa Oil Palm Programme (SWAPP) which is one of their aims to contribute towards sustainable increase and efficiency and productivity in the oil palm sector both at primary production and at processing level.

He added that Cocoa Rehabilitation and Intensification Programme (CoRIP) is the second project and that both of these are running from 2017-2021.

“Sustainable West Africa Palm Programme (SWAPP) was developed and implemented by Solidaridad West Africa (SWA) in the period 2012-2016” Jengre said; adding that under the first phase of SWAPP the business case was for developing the West African Oil Palm Production and process sector.

“We are in five continents, and globally we operate in 10 commodities: cocoa, textile, gold among others,” Jengre said; adding that they are currently operating in five West African countries and they are specialized in bringing together production in marketing.