Yambasu Agriculture Initiative (YAI) farmers from 15 annual conferences across Africa, who recently trained in Porto Novo, Benin, are realizing tremendous change and results in their farming skills upon returning home. Several examples of both small and more robust changes enacted by five initiative participants follow. Even small changes yield encouraging results.

The General Board of Global Ministries provided funding for a fish farming project for an annual conference in Côte d’Ivoire.

“The first phase of the project for Tilapia Fish Farming Enterprise in Gouagonoupleu in Man Mission District included the creation and implementation of 15 ponds with a capacity of about 3000 fish each,” said Simon Nathan Koffi, YAI Cote D’Ivoire project manager. “Songhai training helped us to have a better understanding of the stages of fish production and especially the rational management of fish feed. We were taught natural fish farming skills and how we can improve our productivity by controlling the physio-chemical parameters of the pond water.”

Koffi’s fish farming tuition is paying off as the fish farm project smoothly gets underway. As he monitors the growth of the fish, everything seems to be working well and he expects a bumper harvest in April. 

In Kamina, North Katanga Conference in the DR Congo, the farm supervisor, Alex Ilunga Kibombe, says his team is using the Songhai Center knowledge sparingly.

“After Songhai, we evaluated the activities we were doing compared to the methods being used at Songhai Center. We agreed that Songhai is a model that we would want to use,” he explained. Integrating the Songhai model will be done in phases, Kibombe said.  

“The Songhai training really pushed us to increase the level of farming that we are implementing right now and to learn some new strategies,” he said. “In the animal department, we were amazed at the way the Songhai Center set up their chicken farm and how they produce their feed. We thought this was something that we could do to increase our farm margins by minimizing cost of feed.”

Kibombe says there is a shortage of broilers in his episcopal area in the rainy season. Hence the price goes up threefold. “So, we thought this could be the opportunity to take advantage of the demand. We bought egg incubators. We will be using them to hatch the eggs and multiply our production rate,” he said.

Based on their training in Songhai, Kibombe’s team is assessing how to transition from using chemical fertilizers to organic fertilizers. “We bought organic fertilizers from Zambia. We have started our vegetable production site where we are using the organic fertilizers. We are having success because we finished the nursery in time; now we are transplanting it. The vegetables are growing well,” he says. With time, he is hopeful they will be able to produce their own organic fertilizers.

“With funding from Global Ministries, we recently bought a tractor, a plow and harrow, which increased our production. Last year, we did only six hectares (14.8 acres). This year, we tripled that to 18 hectares. And because we started seed production, we have clients who bought our seed. It is inspiring us now to do other varieties. We are marketing the seeds and having more clients and more contracts,” he confirmed.

In Northeast Nigeria, Ephraim Ibrahim Jen and team are stocking up locally-produced animal feed in preparation for cattle raising.

“We are making use of the knowledge we got from Songhai especially in rice production. We are doing irrigation like what we saw in Songhai; only that we do not have much organic manure since we do not yet have animals to produce what we need on the farms at the moment,” he said. The ongoing elections and the redenomination of the Nigerian currency is affecting the farm work because cash withdrawal from the banks are restricted at this time.

In the Central Nigeria Annual Conference, the YAI team, led by Ezekiel Nyangani, is doing dry season rice production on 10 hectares of land, which Nyangani says is by far better with expected high yields. “The cycle will continue into the rainy season so that rice production, which is the staple food for many Nigerians, will continue all year round. The main challenge though remains the high cost of fuel used for pumping water during irrigation. Fuel cost is now three times more than the cost budgeted in the project,” he said. “This undermines the profit margin at the end of the farming year.”

In East Angola, Gilbert João Augusto says his annual conference has the objectives of raising pigs and ensuring food security, which is linked with teaching community farmers new methods of growing and planting maize. “The training in Songhai helped to increase the food production skills of our local communities. Upon our return, we taught them new cultivation techniques and the use of organic matter, which is less expensive and most times free,” he said. “Hence, communities are producing and marketing more food and they can now meet more of their family needs.”

The project sells the maize from the farms as they continue to distribute animals to community farmers for use in their respective farm projects as well as sell the pigs, which will help them gain financial autonomy. “Harvesting maize by hand is taking a lot of time with just a few workers available,” Augusto says.

“Animal husbandry has been identified as a potential for revenue generation for YAI Sierra Leone. We are increasingly adapting our animal rearing skills to technical skills learned at Songhai,” YAI project coordinator in Sierra Leone, the Rev. Solomon Rogers, noted.

“We learned that fattening pigs without control, for instance, dampens customers’ spirit. Adding certain herbs to pigs’ feed, as we learned from Songhai, has been successful in producing lean meat, which has increased the demand for our meat from customers,” Rogers confirmed.

The workshop offerings and practical experience that farmers and church leaders received through the Songhai training helped each of these YAI participants choose different aspects of agriculture and animal raising techniques to fit their contexts and levels of production; yet all of them have made progress in their current agribusiness practice by incorporating new methods in their farm management. This has encouraged annual conferences to try new techniques to improve their production and invest in their own development, a key goal of the Yambasu Agriculture Initiative.

Phileas Jusu is the director of communications for the Sierra Leone Annual Conference.

The Yambasu Agriculture Initiative

The Yambasu Agriculture Initiative was launched by Global Ministries in 2020, renaming an earlier agriculture program in honor of the legacy of Bishop John K. Yambasu. The program works toward the realization of the vision shared by the late bishop that the African church can be made self-sustaining if its resources, both land and human, are optimized through agriculture. Through the provision of grants and training, YAI mobilizes existing land and human resources within the church; improves community livelihoods and food security long-term; and builds capacity in annual conferences toward long-term financial solvency.

Support food security and agricultural sustainability in Africa.

The post Songhai training ignites new drive in Yambasu Agriculture Initiative farmers appeared first on Global Ministries.

Along the coast of southern Mozambique, beautiful and visible changes are taking place. Where once the land was wild and idle, 75 acres of land owned by the Mozambique United Methodist Church have been put into production and now yield fruits in their harvest seasons.

In Inhambane province, the Massinga area includes five districts of the UMC with a total of 30 parishes. Two churches are within the city of Massinga, but the rest are found in rural areas. Although the church facilities are small, they have land.

In the Massinga South and Anhane districts, a total of 12.3 acres of different kinds of vegetables have been cultivated and harvested on church land. Another 62 acres in the districts yield cassava, a cash crop, which will provide income for the church and the people cultivating the land. An additional 12 acres in Chilacua District has already yielded enough vegetables to bring in U.S. $1,100 for this first pilot project.

Anhane District now has a farm with 25 pigs, which have multiplied their families with 60 piglets running through a newly fenced-in yard. In Massinga North District, a small herd of 12 cattle have a home on some wide-open church land, enough for grazing and room to grow.

And fruit trees are taking root at churches across 12 acres of the Massinga area. Soon they will yield their fruits too. All of these changes are the fruits of the first Yambasu Agriculture Initiative pilot program cultivated in the Mozambique South Annual Conference.

Over the last two years, the initiative has awarded grants to 15 United Methodist annual conferences in Africa, with grants to three new conferences beginning this year. Conferences participating in the initiative include: Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC (South, Central, North Katanga and East episcopal areas), Angola (East and West), Zimbabwe, (East and West) Mozambique (South and North) and Nigeria (Central and North East).

Blair Moses Kamanga, a missionary serving the Mozambique North Annual Conference, was the technical advisor for the pilot project. It has provided valuable information as the conference evaluates the next steps in agriculture production.

According to Dr. Kepifri Lakoh, the director of the Yambasu Agriculture Initiative, the initiative allows Global Ministries to accompany annual conferences as they build their capacities and develop sustainable revenue streams through agriculture. He describes two main goals for the initiative: financial sustainability for annual conferences and an increase in food security at the community level.

“We have a moral obligation to support the communities,” Lakoh noted. “The grants we issue are not only about microenterprises at the conference level. We also develop interventions that produce locally and increase the level of food security and income at the household level.”

To meet the challenge of helping conference leaders and farmers manage projects more effectively and increase their creativity to explore innovative ideas, the Yambasu Initiative recently held a six-week training session at the Songhai Center in Porto Novo, Benin. Sessions were held in English, French and Portuguese for two weeks each.

The Yambasu Agriculture Initiative was the first major project launched by Roland Fernandes as he became general secretary of Global Ministries in 2020. “The initiative seeks to utilize African resources, both land and human expertise, to develop sustainable revenue streams through agriculture for the growth of the church,” Fernandes said in his message shared at the Benin training event.

“Key to the initiative are: 1. conference ownership, 2. sustainability and 3) indigenous solutions (African solutions for African problems),” he said. “I would like to state that it is my commitment to the continuing realization of this vision; walking alongside bishops and other church leaders on the African Continent.”

Mozambique sent two missionaries, Kamanga and John Nday, who works in Cambine, and eight more staff members to the training in Benin. Lakoh is hopeful that this high-level training will help them dream bigger and assure them of what they can do. But training happens at all levels of the initiative.

The Massinga pilot trained 90 church and community leaders from 30 groups in various aspects of agriculture production. These 90 were trained to be facilitators in their communities. Currently they have passed on their knowledge to about 900 other farmers, for a total of 1,000 trained in one year. Participating farmers received seeds and farming tools in addition to training.

Luisa Chiquede is one of the project beneficiaries from the Anhane community. “I used to grow my cassava using old agricultural practices. The seed from the project has increased my production. I can see the huge difference now.”

“We have already started addressing hunger problems and income generation through the sale of cassava and groundnuts,” she said. “I am making cassava flour to sell at market.

“I think this project is also a catalyst for others. When people see us busy harvesting and working in our fields, they ask us how they can be involved.”

The Mozambique Episcopal Area will implement two more grants in 2023. One will provide a phase two program for Mozambique South Conference to continue to develop the Massinga projects. The second grant will begin a project in Mozambique North Conference in two UMC districts, Gondola and Macate.

Leaders working in Massinga identified several gaps that are currently being addressed during the project’s second phase. These include better irrigation methods, additional cassava processing machines, farm machinery to till and harvest the land, storage for harvested crops and feed, and a general need to scale-up cassava, piggery, cattle and chicken production.

The North Mozambique Conference’s new project aims at improving sustainable income for the church, livelihoods for farmers, food and nutrition security for communities and climate resilience in general. In addition to vegetable production, the North Conference will be investing in bananas, plantains and poultry production.

Fernandes confirmed Global Ministries ongoing support for the Yambasu Initiative. “From the agriculture conference in South Africa in 2019 to the launching of the Yambasu Agriculture Initiative in 2020 and the recent training of agriculture experts from different parts of Africa at the Songhai Center in Benin, the Holy Spirit continues to lead us in this path toward building the foundations that are needed to realize this initiative’s vision.”

Christie R. House is a consultant writer and editor with Global Ministries and UMCOR.

The Yambasu Agriculture Initiative

The Yambasu Agriculture Initiative (YAI) was launched by Global Ministries in 2020, renaming an earlier agriculture program in honor of the legacy of Bishop John K. Yambasu, who died in a car accident that year. The program works toward the realization of the vision shared by the late bishop that the African church can be made self-sustaining if its resources, both land and human, are optimized through agriculture. Through the provision of grants and training, YAI mobilizes existing land and human resources within the church; improves community livelihoods and food security long-term; and builds capacity in annual conferences toward long-term financial solvency.

Support food security and agricultural sustainability in Africa.

The post Yambasu Agriculture Initiative takes root in Mozambique appeared first on Global Ministries.