YAP proposal #225: Growing Prunier du Japon Fruit (Felix Nshimiyimana, Rwanda)

Beneficiaries of the project

Beneficiaries of the project include: my family and population around about of Musanze District where the project will be take place, which entails the county.

Project timeline

Starting: one year; duration: four years

The cost of the project

RWF 3,800,000

The goal of the project

To improve the nutrition and diet of the surrounding population of Musanze District through the cultivation of Prunier du Japon fruits.

The project owner’s background

I am Felix Nshimiyimana, 32, holder of Bachelor of Agriculture Science with Honours in rural development and agribusiness. I have one year of experience growing Prunier du Japon.

The project context

The majority of the population (87%) depends on agricultural activities. The poverty rate has dropped by almost 12% in five years from 2008 with 56.7% to 2012 with 44.9%.

This combined with malnutrition, hinders people’s health, especially that of the young children.

The key reasons for the reduction in the poverty rate in Rwanda are: improved agriculture production, increased agribusiness activity, increased farm wages, crop intensification programme, and the terracing programme.

One of the six pillars of Vision 2020 is to transform ‘subsistence agriculture into agriculture market oriented particularly among rural people living under malnutrition’. This project will take place on the highlighted above area.

The motivations of the project owner

The things that make me plan and conducting the current project in the given areas:

I was excited to deal with this current problem of malnutrition of young children, as well the adults in the area, by putting the knowledge received from school into practice, by contributing to the development of my area.

My bachelor’s degree was oriented to the growing of Prunier du Japon fruits, where it was found that as they provide supplementary nutrients, which can give help to the population to survive in the their daily life.

I choose to upgrade or broaden my thoughts on growing Prunier du Japon, because I came to  find in the community some of them they have the stochastic nature or misunderstanding that, the fruits are eaten by the rich man.

So, I came to realize that the growing of this plant with awareness can help them be well and bring positive changes to the population.

The project will benefit the owner and the population surroundings.

This projection will be well implemented because I already have one year of experience growing this fruit.

Steps to achieve the project

• It is better to respect the time period of cultivation and doing well requires activities undertaken with a good collaboration of stakeholders—project partners, namely the technicians of the district.
• Increasing awareness through field trip demonstrations, by changing the stochastic nature of farmers, in terms of having more information about Prunier du Japon.

The description of main activities planned to start a project

The main activities required to run the project will be buying and renting for planting the fruit, seedbed preparation, awareness-raising of the benefits, and searching for markets.

The success measures of the project

The capability to secure the required finance and maintaining positive cash flow, monitoring daily the plants (agroecosystems analysis), fruit production (good quality and quantity), awareness, and day to day management, A capable workforce and market availability with the qualified project team management risk; the supervision of all activities, including the land parcel on the planted fruits.

The budget (USD 5000 grant)

This grant will be used in the following ways:

• Renting and buying land with USD 1,700
• Preparation of the seedbeds USD 800
• The use of fertilizers (organic and chemical) with USD 500
• Land or parcelling activities with salaries of guardians of crop during harvesting period USD 600
• Transportation to the markets USD 200
• Unforeseen expenses will be USD 1,200
• Therefore, repartition of the total amounts equal than USD 5000.

The timeframe for the project activities will be one year.

 

Blogpost and picture submitted by Felix Nshimiyimana (Rwanda): nshifelix1984[at]yahoo.com

The content, structure and grammar are at the discretion of the author only.

 

This post is published as proposal #225 of “YAP” – our “Youth Agripreneur Project”.

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