The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has trained 50 members from 10 cooperatives in Western Equatoria State.
The farmers brought from Yambio and Nzara counties were trained on cooperative formation and management skills and raising of capital focusing on Honey production.
Speaking to Radio Tamazuj on Friday, the deputy head of the FAO field office in Yambio, Mrs Esther Kenyi, said the training aimed to upgrade the farmers to meet the international market demands.
“We organized four days of training which started on the 4th and ended on the 7th of October,” Esther said.
The training, she said, will also include the provision of honey processing equipment to farmers.
“We want to do for them a business aggregation centre, and we bring equipment for processing honey, and our vision is that the honey of Western Equatoria will go to other countries out of South Sudan,” she said.
The FAO representative in the area also urged farmers to implement the knowledge they have gotten from the training and keep grouping themselves in cooperatives.
Meanwhile, the Minister of Cooperatives in the state, Yona Robert Mark, appreciated the organization for its partnership with the government and appealed to FAO to extend the project to other counties.
“For us as a government, we are happy with FAO for bringing this training for the honey producers in Western Equatoria, so we need this training to be done in the other counties,” he said.
Meladu Martha Daniel, one of the participants who attended the training, said the knowledge she got would help her.
“As I have got the skills in this training, if I go back now to our cooperative, I can be able to do more things than what I have been doing before because I got the knowledge,” she said.
“What I need from this organization who brought the training is that they should not leave us like that. They should stand and direct us on where we are going wrong so that we can do something more to help our colleagues who did not attend the training,” she added.
Source: Radio Tamazuj