Status of rice post-harvest value addition by smallholder farmers in the Southern Region of Sierra Leone

Smallholder farmers in Sierra Leone are characterized by their socio-demographic characteristics which affect their ability to add value to rice at post-harvest stages. The rice value addition technologies start from harvesting to storage. Smallholder farmers mainly use manual technologies to harvest, thresh, dry, mill, package, and store their rice at their disposal. The objective of this study was to characterize the context of smallholder rice post-harvest value addition in the Southern Region of Sierra Leone, in terms of harvesting, threshing, drying, destoning, parboiling, milling, sorting and grading, packaging, and storage. The agricultural extension system in Sierra Leone, which builds the capacity of farmers in the rice value chain, like many other developing countries, is confronted with many challenges. Therefore, data for this study were collected from four hundred smallholder rice farmers with a structured interview schedule. Data were processed by the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM SPSS Statistics) version 25.0 software, analyzed using simple descriptive statistics (frequencies, percentages, mean, and standard deviations). The survey results revealed that the majority of the farmers were males and their mean age was 43 years. Additionally, the majority of the farmers practise only two of the total post-harvest value addition technologies. About 10% of the farmers profited less than Le1 equivalent to USD 0.000096 between 2017 to 2020 from the sales of their rice. These results, therefore, suggest that rice processing equipment, training, and credit facilities are required for smallholder farmers for effective rice value addition at post-harvest stages. Keywords: Drying, harvesting, milling, packaging, threshing, rice, Sierra Leone