Nago Bank Fulfilling IFAD’s Purpose of Farming to Address Poverty

In December 2018, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, IFAD launched the Resilient Rural Belize program, providing financing of around sixteen million dollars to contribute to the government’s goal of increasing resilience in rural areas that need the assistance. The U.N-designated body works to address poverty in rural areas of developing countries, such as Belize and on Friday, IFAD’s vice president toured Nago Bank in northern Belize District, to see how the investments have progressed in that community. Here is Doctor Puri speaking about the project, followed by the Program Manager of Resilient Rural Belize, Geraldo Flowers.

Jyotsna Puri

Dr. Jyotsna Puri, Vice President, Strategy and Knowledge Management Department, IFAD

“While COVID climate disasters and shocks like Lisa will occur over and over again – we are going to see typhoons, we are going to see health disasters, I think one of the key learnings that we had from the previous few years is that one, access is really key. Second, we can’t keep depending on humanitarian assistance because humanitarian assistance by definition is emergency assistance. But we know that these events are going to occur over and over again, so we’ve got to build over a medium term.”

Geraldo Flowers

Geraldo Flowers, Program Manager, Resilient Rural Belize

“If you ever get a chance to visit the farms right behind here you will see the thousands of plants – I think about fifteen thousand tomato plants, about an equal number of sweet peppers as well, onions. They have now ventured into the planting of plantain chips for the plantain chip facilities as well. So you get people coming in from San Pedro, Caye Caulker, the Belize District. In fact the area, when you look at Maskall, Bomba, Nago Bank, this is actually the vegetable capital.”