Twelve rice technicians drawn from Kambia, Port Loko, Tonkolili, and Kenema districts have completed a two-week intensive training programme focused on climate-smart agronomic practices for Inland Valley Swamp rice production. The training, facilitated by the Sierra Leone Agricultural Research Institute, was funded through the Japanese Social Development Fund under the Food Systems Resilience Program and forms part of the broader Sierra Leone Rice Systems Capacity Strengthening Project. Behind that layered institutional architecture lies a simpler, more urgent purpose: getting practical knowledge to the farmers who need it most, before the window for meaningful agricultural transformation closes.
The programme’s origins trace back to President Bio’s visit to Vietnam under South-South Cooperation frameworks a diplomatic engagement that yielded not only goodwill but concrete technical support in rice production. What emerged from that bilateral exchange is now taking shape on the ground in Sierra Leone, one training cohort at a time.
The curriculum covered the full arc of rice production in challenging swamp environments. Participants worked through land development techniques bunding, levelling, and water control systems designed for efficient management of Inland Valley Swamps. They were trained in the use of improved, climate-resilient rice varieties suited to shifting rainfall patterns, alongside nursery establishment, transplanting methods, soil fertility management, integrated pest and disease control, and post-harvest handling. Each module addressed a specific point of failure in Sierra Leone’s rice value chain because the losses that undermine smallholder farmers do not typically occur at a single dramatic moment, but accumulate quietly across every stage from seed to storage.
Kepifri Lakoh, the FSRP Project Manager, located the training within a structural problem that has long frustrated agricultural development in Sierra Leone: the gap between what research institutions know and what farmers in remote communities actually practise. Extension message delivery the process of translating agronomic knowledge into farm-level behaviour remains one of the most stubborn constraints to rice productivity in the country. These twelve technicians are being positioned as bridges across that gap, equipped to carry climate-smart practices directly into farming communities across four districts.
Mr. Alpha Yayah Mansaray, Director of Agricultural Extension Services, pointed to a challenge that rarely features in project launch statements but shapes everything downstream: Sierra Leone’s agricultural extension workforce is ageing, and the pipeline of technically trained replacements has not kept pace. This first batch of technicians is, in part, an answer to that demographic reality an attempt to begin replenishing a workforce whose knowledge and presence in rural communities the sector cannot afford to lose.
One of the participants, Nanday Bangura from Tonkolili District, described the training as transformative the kind of assessment that is easy to make in a closing ceremony and harder to sustain when you are back in the field, dealing with farmers who are sceptical of new methods, constrained by limited inputs, and managing land under increasing climate stress.
That is precisely where the programme will be judged. Training rooms and certificates are the beginning. The measure that matters is what happens in the swamps of Kambia and the farms of Port Loko when these technicians return to their communities and begin the slower, less celebrated work of changing how rice is grown.
Sierra Leone imports a significant portion of the rice it consumes a dependence that strains foreign exchange, exposes households to global price shocks, and represents an ongoing failure to fully exploit the country’s agricultural potential. The Inland Valley Swamps, which hold considerable untapped productive capacity, sit at the centre of any credible strategy to reverse that dependence. Climate-smart intensification of IVS rice farming is not a peripheral development intervention. It is, or should be, a national food security priority.
Whether the Feed Salone initiative can sustain the momentum this training has generated providing technicians with the continued support, inputs, and institutional backing they will need once the workshop ends is the question that will determine whether this first batch becomes the foundation of something durable or simply another entry in Sierra Leone’s long catalogue of promising agricultural starts.
