We heard in April that Farmers of the Future is receiving its largest grant ever to open five villages in a new region of Niger!! The grant comes from REGIS (Resilience in Economic Growth in the Sahel), a major USAID-funded project, and enables us to double our reach in the country. It also greatly increases the credibility and visibility for EPN’s signature project.
The application was submitted last September. Since then it has gone through 4 rounds of review starting in Niger, then Washington DC, then Dakar (USAID's West African Regional Office) and finally back to Niger. During that time, we steadily updated implementation plans to be ready to hit the ground running. Our FOF Implementation Team has already held initial organizing meetings with members of the communities and is relocating to the new area in the next few weeks.
2017 will be the most important year in the history of Farmers of the Future. It’s our opportunity to confirm three “Big S’s” -- is Farmers of the Future successful; is it sustainable; and is it scalable? In our next posts, we’ll have more to say on each.