Foreword

Greetings from the West Africa Competitiveness Programme (WACOMP) The Gambia! I bring you wishes of the New Year and welcome you to the maiden edition of the WACOMP The Gambia Newsletter. WACOMP aims to improve the performance and growth of selected value chains and to enhance the climate for business at national and regional level through ensuring standard compliance of West African products. It seeks to offer new green solutions and promote digital transformation, support agribusiness development, employability, productivity and market access for farmers and SMEs. WACOMP is a technical assistance programmatic initiative funded under the 11th European Development Fund. The programme has 1 Regional Component and 16 Country Components. In the Gambia, the WACOMP component is being implemented by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and United Purpose (UP) with close coordination and strong synergies among the two implementing partners. It is aiming to increase competitiveness in The Gambia through enhanced quality compliance along the onion value chain, thereby strengthening the country’s competitiveness and enhancing its integration into the regional and international trading systems. The newsletter will be a quarterly publication that seeks to update our stakeholders and the public in general about the developments unfolding in the project. It is our conviction that the newsletter will go far enough in engaging its audience to not only keep them abreast but also find a sense of belonging in familiarizing themselves with the project and even make contributions in the future editions of the newsletter. In 2021, the project had accomplished its major tasks and this includes the preparation of its inception activities including the development of project implementation strategies, needs assessments and submission of its inception report. We successfully organized a training of laboratory technicians on ISO/IEC 17025:2017 standards in our bid to contribute to The Gambia’s long road to achieve and maintain an ISO Accreditation. Stories of these remarkable milestones and the successfully organized Project Steering Committee (PSC) meeting are some of the major highlights of this edition of the newsletter. WACOMP further complements the UNIDO’s 2021 – 2025 Country Programme in The Gambia and our staff have been instrumental in providing necessary support to its launch. While I look forward to an eventful 2022, I thank you for dedicating your time in reading this bulleting, hoping you will find it interesting.

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Happy reading!

Bernard Bau

UNIDO WACOMP Project Manager,

Department of Digitalization, Technology and Innovation