She leads a women’s group that fetches over FCFA 250,000 twice a month on processing.
Gone are the days when people thought agriculture was the last thing to do and at best by people who have got no other job in life. The trend is changing and cassava that used to be grown only for subsistence is fast becoming a life-changer. Like in Ngoumou and Minkoa where the President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the country’s agricultural stakeholders visited last Friday, Bakingili, Fako Division in the South West Region is fast becoming a cassava hub in the country.
At the centre of the crop production and processing in the locality is Progressive Women Bakingili under the presidency of Mrs. Nganje Immaculate. A closer look at Mrs. Nganje wouldn’t show anything of a rural woman who works under rain and sun, using archaic farming methods (cutlass and hoe) to get cassava that her family can eat. This is agriculture of the yesteryears. Thanks to the IFAD-funded roots and tubers programme, she and her 20-woman group got new techniques of cultivating cassava as well as high-yielding seedlings.
The results are telling. “With the 8034 cassava variety we got, our production improved. At first, we suffered, but with the cuttings and machines that came with the programme, our production has moved from 25-30 trucks per hectare to now 35-40 trucks per hectare,” she told Cameroon Tribune at Minkoa while displaying her know-how. With the production comes processing of cassava into garri, chips, water fufu, pancake, acra, bobolo etc. “We produce 10-20 bags of water fufu per week. One kilogramme of the water fufu sells at FCFA 200 and one bag produces averagely 40 kg. Just this activity brings us about FCFA 250,000 every two weeks that we sell given that we sell in periodic markets.” Like other farmers, Mrs. Nganje and her co-members are able to live and let others live, send their children to school and successfully rub shoulders with other women in town who might have erroneously thought that agriculture was for school dropouts and the less fortunate in society.
