Africa-Press – Tanzania. COUNTRY’s edible oil production got a new boost as the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) granted 5.2bn/- for implementation of a big project for cultivating sunflower in Ikungi district, Singida region.
The project is expected to immensely contribute to addressing cooking oil shortage that the country has been grappling with, causing high prices of the commodity in the local market.
Ikungi District Executive Director (DED) for, Mr Justice Kijazi revealed this today (Monday) when representatives from KOICA, UN Women, and UN Family Planning Agency (UNFPA) visited selected project sites in the district.
The delegation visited the sites of the project to see progress made so far since the project was launched a year ago.
Mr Kijazi said that the project, which is being supervised by the UN Women and UNFPA is being implemented by the Ikungi council under the theme “Realizing Gender Equality through Empowering Women and Adolescent girls”.
During its implementation, the project would directly benefit about 120,000 women and young women in the three years of its implementation.
He said that apart from dealing with horticulture farming, more efforts would be put to improve sunflower cultivation in order to combat edible oil shortage in the country, noting that a lot of money is being spent on importing the product.
