Seeding Sierra Leone’s Food Secure Future

In Sierra Leone, a first-of-its-kind farm is helping make the country self-sufficient in onion production, training a new generation of farmers, and boosting families’ quality of life.

For Mohamed Sowe, there is something magical in the transformative power of a tiny onion seed.

In just four months, with the right conditions, Sowe says, the seed, as small as a grain of sand, can yield a robust vegetable weighing more than a pound. Along the way, as Sowe has witnessed first-hand in Lungi, Sierra Leone, these tiny seeds can also transform lives.

Sowe is the soft-spoken CEO of Pee Cee Agriculture, based in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and for the past four years, onions have preoccupied his life. Sowe oversees the first large-scale commercial farming operation in Sierra Leone focused on the local market. The farm, located 50km from Freetown, the capital city is already producing onions at yields more than ten times higher than local farmers, reducing the country’s reliance on imports. It is also providing much-needed jobs for local communities, offering a financial lifeline for families, many of whom struggle with food and nutrition insecurity.

Before Pee Cee Agriculture, commercial onion farming had never taken root in Sierra Leone. The farm’s parent company, Pee Cee Holdings (PCH), a privately-owned consumer goods group, imports more than 80 percent of the country’s onions. But a severe shortage during the Covid-19 crisis laid bare the risks of an overreliance on imports for staple food products. That’s when Pee Cee’s executive team came up with a bold idea: why not just grow the onions themselves?

“The farm means more to Pee Cee Holdings than just profit making,” Sowe says. “It demonstrates our ability and willingness to go into sustainable strategies that create jobs, employment, and that complete the value chain from farming to the up-market. It is critical for Pee Cee Holdings to have industries that produce and seed and grow things in Sierra Leone.”

With dedicated support from IFC, the strategy has paid off. Since 2021, IFC experts have partnered with Pee Cee Agriculture to help the company strengthen their management team, improve agricultural and irrigation practices, implement best Environmental and Social (E&S) practices, and train local farmers and workers.

Now, both IFC and Pee Cee are taking things to the next level, with a $12 million loan to scale up operations. The loan, half of which will be provided by the International Development Association Private Sector Window Blended Finance Facility, will help Pee Cee purchase new processing machinery and build storage facilities.

“Pee Cee Agriculture has the potential to make Sierra Leone self-sufficient in onion, a staple currently virtually all imported,” says Dahlia Khalifa, IFC Regional Director for Central Africa and Anglophone West Africa. “This investment will be transformational for Sierra Leone. It will greatly contribute to food and nutrition security, provide quality jobs and enhance livelihoods, and promote sustainable and inclusive development, three of IFC’s main priorities.”

The ultimate goal, says Mahesh Nandwani, the CEO of Pee Cee Holdings, is to grow enough onions not only to satisfy the local market, but also to create an entirely new export industry. Nandwani, a second-generation Indian Sierra Leonean, who grew his father’s small business into Sierra Leone’s largest import, distribution and manufacturing company, believes that this homegrown onion operation has global reach.

“If we do a proper job, this country can go back to the days where we were not only growing food for ourselves, we were also exporting something,” Nandwani says. “Those were the golden days. We should bring them back.”

From the swamps to the highlands: growing the perfect onion

In late 2021, Luc Terryn, a Belgian farmer and horticulture expert, was at home in Dakar, Senegal, when his phone rang. On the line was Jean Habay, an IFC Principal Investment Officer for Agribusiness. Habay had a proposal: could Terryn come to Sierra Leone to help advise an onion farm in the early stages of production? It would only take a few days, he added.

“That was three-and-a-half years ago,” says Terryn, with a laugh. “I am still here.”

At that time, Pee Cee’s early forays into onion production were not going well. The company’s chosen plot of land was yielding few onions, and those that grew were poor in quality. IFC, approached by PCH for potential financing, was not comfortable moving forward until an IFC incubator team could help PCH prove their concept. Terryn, who had successfully expanded a potato and onion farm in Poland over twenty years from 100 hectares to 700, was brought in.

Terryn could see immediately what the problem was. The land was too swampy and could not accommodate mechanized farming. The soil pH level was also poor. The farm would need to be moved somewhere else. But, despite these challenges, Terryn saw something else: “I saw a lot of possibilities to grow onions in Sierra Leone,” he says.

Terryn found a new location, a higher swath of land near Freetown’s international airport in Lungi, a northern province. With IFC advisory support, Terryn, now working as Pee Cee’s Farm Manager, set about clearing bush, establishing boreholes, installing drip and pivot irrigation systems, and improving the soil pH levels. A detailed business plan to purchase the right equipment and inputs was finalized. Extensive E&S impact assessments, in cooperation with local communities, were conducted, in addition to the hiring of an E&S manager.  This intensive advisory support by IFC would later prove transformative in increased onion yields.

In those early days, Sowe admits, IFC’s exacting standards were something of a burden for a small agricultural company with big ambitions. “Imagine this,” he says. “[As a company] you’re moving from input and distribution to farming but with no farming experience.”

But Jean Habay says that from the outset, it was clear that Pee Cee Holdings, led by visionary CEO Mahesh Nandwani, had exactly what IFC needed for the partnership to work.

“They were a motivated client who knew how to build and run an organization successfully in Sierra Leone,” says Habay. “They had market access, which is critical, and established fresh onion distribution across the country. The fact is, Pee Cee brought most of what it took. They just needed a little more to help make it a success on their own.”

Sowing a new generation of onion farmers

On a spring morning near the coastal town of Lungi, 23-year-old Gloria Kadiatu Kamara is deep in concentration as she pulls weeds and grasses from the ochre earth that lines the onion beds of Pee Cee’s farm.

Gloria is one of hundreds of workers employed by Pee Cee from nearby villages on a seasonal basis. A single mother, Gloria is the sole caretaker of her daughter, and Gloria’s younger sister, too. She is proud of the knowledge that she has gained as part of Pee Cee’s team.

“When I joined the farm, I did not know how onions are planted, how watering is done, and how chemicals are pumped on the farm,” she says. “But working at the farm, I have learnt all of that.”

Providing Pee Cee’s farm workers with skills training is just one element of a mission that the company has embraced to create a new generation of farmers across Sierra Leone.

“We cannot build a farm where we always bring in experts from abroad,” says Mohamed Sowe. “Some of the key performance indicators we are looking at is how do we build local capacity to transfer these skills… those positions should be occupied by local people who, over a period of time, could manage the farm on their own.”

Sowe points to Pee Cee junior agronomist, Augusta Bungapu Kamara, a twenty-eight-year-old agri-studies graduate from Sierra Leone’s Njala University, who has worked on the farm since its outset. Under Terryn’s tutelage, Augusta has, among other skills, mastered the complex and delicate process of mixing fertilizer formula and under what conditions it should be applied.

“Augusta never dealt with fertilizer formula before,” Sowe says. “Now she trains other people in terms of the fertilization mix and administering the fertilizer.”

While revenue growth matters for Pee Cee Holdings, so too does “community growth”, says Ekta Nandwani, PCH’s Human Resources director, and the daughter of CEO, Mahesh Nandwani. That is why Pee Cee is working closely with local communities, Nandwani says, helping build and renovate schools, mosques, and other community gathering places. This year, Pee Cee fully renovated a maternal health clinic, where women now have access to free health care.

“We now have the courage as women to go to this hospital for antenatal, delivery and post-natal visits,” says Gloria Kamara. “In the past, it really was not decent at all. Most women shied away from going there.”

For Gloria, the maternal hospital is just one of many positive additions that Pee Cee has ushered in. “I have made a lot of changes in my life from working on this farm,” she says. “Before, we slept on the floor. Since I joined the farm, now we have a bed and utensils.”

Gloria’s colleague, Manusu Mansaray, a widowed mother of two, who works as a weeder, agrees. Since Pee Cee began hiring, the rate of theft in local villages has decreased significantly, Manusu says. Like Gloria, Manusu can now pay school and university fees for her children. Pee Cee brings a sense of empowerment to the lives of women, “especially for us women who have no men in our lives,” she says.

Ekta Nandwani, a key member of PCH management, is proud of Pee Cee’s reach. While PCH, as a parent company, directly employs more than 1,500 people, indirectly, from logistics, to wholesalers, delivery, she estimates that 10,000 people throughout Sierra Leone benefit from the company’s business. The farm, alone, employs 200 seasonal workers.

That trickle down benefit is obvious in the bustling Dove Cot market, located several kilometers from Pee Cee’s farm, where scores of street-side onion traders sell bulky netted bags of Pee Cee onions. On the corner of Guard Street, trader Isata Lansana says that his customers prefer Pee Cee’s onions to the imported variety as they are higher quality and more affordable. “I make more profit selling the local onions I buy from Pee Cee,” he says, adding that on a good day he can sell up to a hundred bags.

With the current harvest almost complete, Mohamed Sowe is already looking ahead. Next season, he hopes to increase the farm by another 35 hectares. By 2030, the farm will extend to 500 hectares and will produce enough onions to make the country self-sufficient in a staple that is key for food and nutrition security. The farm is already growing maize and, in time, will also grow potatoes alongside onions. Plans are also in place for an outreach program, where Pee Cee will distribute inputs and provide expertise to smallholder farmers to grow various crops that will improve the diet of local communities.

Despite the early challenges, Sowe is glad for the rigor and discipline that Pee Cee undertook, at the advice of IFC, to get things right at the start, particularly in terms of governance, environmental and social matters and worker outreach. To be a pioneer in industry, Sowe says, and to change people’s lives, you must take your time and make tough decisions. “If the foundation is good, then the outcome will be good,” he said.

Sowe shakes his head at the impossibility, once again, that a tiny seed could lead to all this.

“The challenge has been serious,” Sowe says, “but the results have been sweet.”

AUTHOR
Caitríona Palmer and Birom Seck
SOURCE
Originally published on ifc.org
PHOTOS
© Ronnie Larry Tucker for IFC