Project Updates
Agriculture
Highlight Achievement
Based on MJP’s Household Reclassification Survey (2010/2011) targeting all 857 families, there were significant improvements in the level of poverty in Samlout. See Figure 1. An assessment of the change in the level of poverty from 2007 (1076 households) to 2010 (857 households) was derived from a composite of eight indicators. The most significant result was that the poorest category dropped from 41-31% and the medium category increased from 18-41%. There were 11% of households that moved from poorest to poor and 23% that moved from poor to medium classification. Around 4% of the households made the larger leap from poorest to medium classification. The data was provided by 6 groups from MJP’s 6 target villages. Village chiefs, village elders, teachers, key farmers, widows and village development committee members all participated in the groups.
Figure 1: Changes in the level of poverty between 2007 and 2010
The survey also showed that crop productions and livestock farming (pigs and chickens) significantly increased since farmers started to adopt MJP’s Technology Implementation Packages (TIP). For example, in 2006, farmers harvested 4 tons per hectare of maize, 1.20 t/ha of peanuts and 1.30 t/ha of soybeans. In 2010, however, farmers collected 5.17 t/ha of maize, 1.90 t/ha of peanuts and 1.68 t/ha of soybeans. Farmers did face challenges, such as extreme weather conditions (excessive rainfall and drought during the Early Wet Season) and stem diseases that affected some of the main crops (soybeans, sesame and maize).