(September 9, 2015)
Welcomed by the chief of Gandiaye Municipality, Deputy Under Secretary for the USDA’s Foreign Agriculture Service Alexis Taylor and USDA Senegal staff visited an U.S. Co-ops Senegalese millet processing plant in late August, noting the first time a foreign authority has visited the site.
Part of a tour visiting USDA funded field projects, the visit to the millet processing plant in in Gandiaye, Senegal included speeches by dignitaries, a tour of the production process, and a drum session led by the son of Yande Codou Séne, a local cultural legend.
The millet processing plant is run by 15 women in Gandiaye, who established the plant in 2012 as part of USDA and U.S. Co-ops’s first millet value chain project in Senegal (MVCP). The Gandiaye plant women were part of the 9,000 farmers and producers trained in millet production and marketing services from 2009 – 2013.
U.S. Co-ops’s current USDA millet business services project (MBSP) builds on that initial project by focusing on developing processing systems, improving production quality, post-harvest handling, and expanding millet trade through public-private partnerships. This second phase millet project is expected to sell over 1,400 tons of millet on the market and improve millet production for over 42,000 hectares of land.
With $9.6 million in programmatic funds, MBSP almost doubles U.S. Co-ops’s USDA funding for millet value chains in Senegal and will be implemented through 2017.
The guests took a tour of the plant, saw demonstrations of the millet processing circuit and tasted the finished product for sale.