The Board of Directors of the African Development Fund has approved $12.16 million in additional grant funding for the Rice Agro-Industrial Cluster Project in Sierra Leone.

The project was first approved in November 2021. The new tranche, to be sourced from the 2022 Performance-based Allocation, will fill a funding gap in the project’s total cost of nearly $37 million.

In addition to bringing the country toward rice self-sufficiency, the project is improving the livelihoods of rural households by extending quality inputs, land and water management, mechanization and extension services to farmers to increase rice production. The project is also improving the value chain through rice processing and promoting the consumption and marketing of locally processed rice.

In July 2022, the African Development Bank approved a grant of $1.92 million to boost food production in Sierra Leone under its African Emergency Food Production Facility (https://bit.ly/3wGWi3O), a response to a looming global food crisis that resulted from the Russia-Ukraine conflict.