Fighting Poverty Together: The Gambia

Abstract

ActionAid began operating in The Gambia in 1979. We work mainly with subsistence farmers in over 600 villages in three rural areas, shown on the map below. Groundnuts provide 85 per cent of the country’s export earnings. The main food crops are maize and rice, but poor people living in rural areas cannot produce enough food for themselves. This is due to inappropriate farming techniques, environmental degradation and natural disasters, such as drought and floods. The removal of agricultural subsidies and liberalisation of the groundnut trade in the 1980s caused increased hardship for farmers. Low levels of literacy, leading to lack of skills and slow technological progress, also cause poverty.