Mayor Yvonne Aki -Sawyerr: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 13 June 2021:
We are thrilled to expand our Urban Farming initiative to an additional 200 women-headed households in Ojuku Junction and Kamayama. This has been done with funding from UN Habitat and implementation through CRS, FEDURP (the Slum Dwellers Association) and COHDISAPA.
Designed as part of Freetown City Council’s (FCC) COVID-19 preparedness and response plan, the 200 beneficiaries are provided with farming tools, planting boxes, seeds, training and mentoring. The initiative will enable household food production, improving the nutritional status of women and children.
Excess food grown can be sold, providing a revenue source for beneficiaries. Thanks to Cllr Fatmata Kamara for hosting us in Ojuku Junction on Friday, 11th June 2021.
Last Friday’s expansion of Urban Farming support to 200 women builds on our existing Urban Farming support extended in November 2020 to 300 women in the Bottom Oku, Kaningo and Tree Planting communities and funded by the EU.
We can go beyond external funding and do more for our residents and our city; Please Pay Your Property Rates to Transform Freetown.
In another development, I also visited schools in Allen Town where I shared environmental and sanitation messages with local school children.
Children and young people can be very effective change agents, so it is important that FCC’s environmental and sanitation messages are directly communicated to them.
So last Friday, accompanied by Councillor Alhassan Bangura and Collins Pearce, FCC Education Department, I visited Allen Town Municipal School, Baptist Secondary School Allen Town and Victory Evangelist Ministry School.
We had excellent conversations with pupils about waste management. Each session started with me telling them that I needed their help to fix a problem and then the question – “what do you do with the empty plastic packet when you finish drinking water?”
Each session ended with the pupils promising to stop dropping the plastic packets on the ground and to share that message with their family and friends.
Savings that we make as a city by individuals properly disposing of our waste, will enable Freetown City Council to deliver more services to all residents.
The Mayor of Freetown, Madam Sawyer just keeps on moving and moving forward like the incomparable “Energizer Bunny.” She is truly a gift to our beloved Sierra Leone where foxes and wolves are competing in the race for the soul of our struggling nation; My Goodness, the wolves and foxes have been running but Madam Sawyer has outpaced them with the frightening speed of young agile Impalas. (lol) This is what authentic, dependable leadership should aspire to look like; While the SLPP and their freeloading Professors are overfeeding themselves like hungry hippos, the Mayor of Freetown has been weaving dreams, hopes and aspirations and bringing them to reality through diligence and hard work for our poor people. A woman on a mission empowering other women and showing them the way to success that’s who she is; Now you tell me what’s more admirable and selfless than that.
I hope the dummies with huge Potbellies are jotting down notes to help them acknowledge that Madam Aki Sawyer is totally out of their league – a real Champion and heroine of our people. Who wants to see an incompetent old soldier that achieves nothing? Come with me to State House. And who is among our people that is striving to see an innovative, resourceful Patriot that has been able to squeeze water out of stones for the benefit of our women and children?
Then come with me to Freetown for it is there you will find a Busy Worker Bee that toils day and night, in rain and sunshine, come hell or highwater….This Patriotic daughter of the soil, toils not for her own motives, but for the national interest of our little Sierra Leone, my beloved home.(lol)