By Fatou B Cham- Information Officer, MoA
The Minister of Agriculture, Honourable Amie Fabureh, Thursday, 21st April 2022, embarked on a monitoring and visibility tour of the project intervention sites of which the Pirang drainage and Pirang-Faraba feeder road and the Pirang rice field were part.
Honourable Amie Faburay accompanied by Central Project Coordinating Unit (CPCU), Directors from the various Departments, and the team from the Ministry of Agriculture visited different project intervention sites located in West Coast, Lower River and Central River Regions respectively.
According to her, the Ministry of Agriculture does not only limit itself to crop and livestock production but is also going beyond to build drainage for communities that are prone to floods.
She emphasized the importance of the drainage system disclosing that when it rains, most households in this community are being affected by floods.
Minister Faburay, therefore, urged the contractors to fast-track the work before the rainy season so that the community would not be affected by rain.
Tijan Sanneh, CPCU Engineer, explained that this is a drainage infrastructural development that is geared towards protecting the community from floods adding that Pirang is a community prone to flooding.
“The idea of this drainage is to divert the water so that the community would not be affected by floods,” he asserted.
According to the engineer, the contract was signed in 2020 and the work is still ongoing because there were several challenges faced during the course of the work which was due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the demise of the project coordinator.
It is also noteworthy that the government of the Gambia has ploughed the Pirang rice field free of charge amongst many other rice fields in the country to ease the burden on farmers.
