In the heart of Magbando, Port Loko District, Sierra Leone, Mrs. Fatmata B. Sankoh, a resilient entrepreneur, is changing her community through agribusiness and demonstrating the transformative impact of empowering rural women. 

Trained by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security in oil palm cultivation, Fatmata and her peers initially produced seedlings for local farmers but eventually established their own farms, collectively planting acres of oil palm plantations. As the years went by, they began harvesting palm fruits, and Fatmata seized the opportunity to venture into palm oil production and established her enterprise “Kalamareh Farming Enterprise”.

“We were harvesting a lot of palm fruits, so I started producing “pamayn” (palm oil) in my community,” Fatmata said. However, the more palm oil I produced, the more palm nuts we collected in the community. “We were burning the palm nut as fuel for the palm production,” Fatmata adds.

However, the abundance of palm nuts, the waste from oil palm production in Magbando ignited Fatmata's entrepreneurial spirit. She established a manual palm kernel processing unit in her village and started producing nut oil (palm kernel oil), in limited quantities. 

Mechanizing palm kernel oil production with support from UNDP

In 2022, Fatmata became a beneficiary of UNDP’s Growth Accelerator programme that aims to accelerate growth of innovative, viable, and ambitious MSMEs with transformative economic impact through improved access to finance, Technical Assistance, and business development services. The support from UNDP Growth Accelerator was a turning point in Fatmata’s entrepreneurship journey. The programme provided her with crucial investments totaling NLe 180,000, technical assistance, and business mentorship which enabled her to acquire a palm kernel cracker and mill. This timely investment revolutionized her community, eliminated waste, and created income streams from palm oil, palm kernel, and their by-products.