Agriculture based income generation project

The vision of the project is to facilitate agriculture based livelihood development, food security and financial sustainability for the char dwellers. It has also modified its agricultural activities to create more sustainable self-driven systems to ensure  farmers’ livelihoods and food security in the region..

Achieving food security for the char dwellers is a principal focus of the agricultural based income generation project, however, as people’s access to food has improved, there is an increasing focus on assisting people to use agriculture for income generation.

Friendship supports farmers with the production of an array of crops. These include maize, jute and rice cultivation, and vegetables and fruit gardening. Friendship is also supporting the community through input provision and technical services such as irrigation pumps, high yield seeds, transport and fishing boats and mobile phones to increase market access and improve communications.

Diversifying agriculture is an important part of Friendship’s activities. The objective is to introduce new crops that enable farmers to work on currently unusable or underutilised lands with low productivity. The introduction of new, high value crops enables farmers to generate income from previously marginal and unusable land. These include sand bar cropping for pumpkins. In addition to producing crops for human consumption, the rearing of livestock along with feed and fodder production are also areas where the programme supports farmers.

As part of Friendship’s approach to developing communities, mobilising local resources is very important. A percentage of the money raised allows communities to initiate projects on their own while creating a sense of ownership in the projects. These projects include training, repair and maintenance existing community projects such as schools, tube wells, irrigation pumps or for emergencies.