The Challenge

Half of Sierra Leone’s citizens are subsistence farmers, with 81 percent of the population living on less than $3.10 per day. In Ghana, 7 million people still live below this poverty line with the majority living in rural communities. Without support, these smallholder farmers are limited to using low-quality inputs and manual labor to grow crops only one season per year. As a result, productivity per hectare is extremely low, leaving many families without enough food to last the year.

The Innovation

WARC’s Service Delivery Unit (SDU) brings its modern machinery and inputs to use on smallholder farmers’ plots—significantly reducing farmers’ taxing manual labor and increasing their yields. In exchange for WARC’s services, these farmers pay in crops, selling their surplus for additional income.

WARC’s second business line hires subsistence farmers to work on its 1,500-hectare Training Farm, where they learn environmentally-conscious farming methodologies and equipment operation. WARC then aggregates and sells the crops from its Training Farm and SDU farmers in Sierra Leone and Ghana, gradually helping the country replace imported staple foods with locally grown rice and maize.

The Impact

WARC has impacted over 600 farmers in Sierra Leone—all of whom earned less than $1.50 per day prior to partnering with the company. The company has increased these farmers’ incomes by an average of 60 percent.