Guinea-Bissau: Right Livelihood Initiative

Farming communities throughout Guinea-Bissau have historically been victims of an entrenched, and often institutional, process of economic marginalization. The Guinea-Bissau Livelihood Initiative (GBLI) aimed to break the current poverty cycle affecting smallholder producers and improve livelihoods through support of government priorities on economic growth and poverty reduction with a focus on agricultural production, market access and regulatory improvements for the farming sector. GBLI targeted crop diversification for food security by providing technical assistance on producing high value crops like tomatoes, onions and particularly rice, which was a priority for the national development agenda of Guinea Bissau.

The program’s core goals were to provide technical assistance, infrastructure investments, access to financing and technology, and direct market linkages for small-holder farmers. The market access strategy also focused on opportunities to improve the conditions for processing, pricing and trading of cashews, and other high value products. The underlying objectives were to economically empower poor producers (primarily women), to extract great value from their products and facilitate a more enabling regulatory and commercial environment for smallholder producers throughout the Guinea-Bissau.

GBLI worked with a community of approximately 5,000 women and men employed in agricultural production. The program engaged stakeholders in Guinea-Bissau’s agriculture sector through four key interventions: technical assistance and capacity building, producer investment and market linkages, policy engagement, and enterprise leadership development. In order to address the root causes of poverty GBLI targeted the interrelated barriers that contribute to the fundamental breakdowns in Guinea-Bissau’s agricultural economy. By leveraging GFI’s expertise in livelihood development and market access to maximize the capacity of local agricultural cooperatives and producer groups, the GBLI program aimed to remove the barriers to economic opportunity for small producers in one of the world’s poorest and most isolated nations.