Sherbro Foundation is honored to announce that the Procter & Gamble Alumni Foundation Fund of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation has awarded us a grant to expand our transformative Let Them Earn project in Sierra Leone. With this funding, 50 more Bumpeh Chiefdom village farmers (majority women) can replicate the success of early participants improving their incomes, livelihoods, and futures.

Through our local partner CCET-SL (Center for Community Empowerment & Transformation—Sierra Leone), Let Them Earn provides smallholder farmers with:

• Interest-free loans to expand their operations     
• Year-round training on improved farming practices
• Classes on basic numeracy and small business management

After covering operating costs, setting aside family food, and repaying their loans, participants have net cash income to improve daily life and reinvest in their farms.

“This grant is a big leap forward that’s adding momentum to what we’re doing with village farmers,” said Bumpeh Chiefdom Paramount Chief Charles Caulker. below right with women farmers. “I want to create a culture of increased productivity where farmers continue to grow more, earn more, and villages lead their own development. I’m deeply grateful to the P&G Alumni Foundation for standing behind us with their support.”

Transforming Lives Through Economic Empowerment

Musu Koroma, below, a mother of three, was one of the first farmers to join Let Them Earn. Last month, she showed me how new earnings from her loan changed her life. She reinforced her mud brick house with strong concrete stucco, safeguarding it for years to come from erosion and collapse in Sierra Leone’s heavy monsoon rains. She installed sturdy hardwood doors and windows that keep out rain and mosquitoes. With pride and confidence, Musu is now sending her son to secondary school in a larger town. 

With earnings from her three-acre farm, Musu Koroma, above left, strengthened her house, before like the mud brick house next door.

“Let Them Earn has helped me so much,” Musu said. “I can now do things I never thought possible.”

Results Speak for Themselves

The impact has been dramatic. Families are sending children and grandchildren for higher levels of education. They have more food and can afford protein like fish, important for child development and disease resistance. Homes become safe and healthy places to live with dignity. Villages are becoming debt-free, and communities are rediscovering hope.

Aminata Sandy, above joined Let Them Earn after losing both her husband and the brother-in-law she became dependent on. With her loan, she hired labor for her farm, secured food for her children, and paid their school fees. As the loan recipient, she manages her farm and a household of eight. She’s repaid most of her loan, with the remainder coming with the year-end harvest.

Aminata confidently stood up in front of her village and Paramount Chief Caulker to tell her story. When women are direct loan recipients, Let Them Earn empowers them to make farm and financial decisions. They’ve gained respect and a voice in managing their village.

Microfinance schemes in rural areas frequently fail. Our partner CCET-SL proudly reported 95+% of year one loans were repaid with the combination of interest-free loans and year-round training tailored to farmer needs. Year two Let Them Earn loan repayment promises to reach the same high level. Repaid loans are reloaned to the next group of farmers eager to improve their lives.

Why This Approach Works

After 14 years working with Sierra Leone, we’ve learned a vital truth: sustainable development doesn’t begin with what you construct — it begins with who you empower.

Schools, wells, and roads are important, but villages can’t develop or sustain growth unless individuals become economically self-reliant. Lasting change happens when you invest directly in people, giving them the means and skills to lift themselves out of poverty.

The Let Them Earn program brings together what truly works: financial access, practical skills, and local empowerment—helping farmers move from subsistence living to building viable, income-generating small businesses. Loans are repaid on schedules that match farm harvests.

Yes, it’s riskier to provide loans to subsistence farmers and small traders. It’s time-intensive to deliver hands-on training in remote villages and provide ongoing coaching. But this is what actually works. This is what moves people and entire communities beyond survival mode to genuine economic opportunity.

Sherbro Foundation sends our deep thanks to the P&G Alumni Foundation for their continued confidence and partnership in Let Them Earn. Year three of the project will bring even greater growth and opportunity to the villages of Bumpeh Chiefdom.

For program details: https://conta.cc/4oVfeom

You can help support Sierra Leone farmers: https://sherbrofoundation.org/donate/

Seventy five women farmers have a chance to become Sierra Leone millionaires. Sherbro Foundation just funded a new group of 75 women to grow groundnuts (we call them peanuts) in the Women’s Vegetable Growing Project – one of our most successful projects to date.

 I can still vividly remember last November when I approached Mobainda village to visit the first women’s project. Women had gathered and filled the narrow dirt road. The car stopped, so I got out to see what was happening. The women began singing and dancing around me. They had come out to honor me and escort me into their village — the traditional way of the women’s society.

No words, no speeches. They just surrounded me with their harmonized singing and drumming on hand-made drums, and slowly moved towards the village.  So, I moved with them, their singing filling the air for the last quarter mile.

They were thanking me – thanking Sherbro Foundation – for helping them plant peanuts in April 2015, right as the Ebola crisis was lifting. These are women who normally live on the slimmest of margins, earning an average of less than $1 a day. They couldn’t even earn that during Ebola, when much farming stopped and markets for selling their produce closed for over four months.

“The Women’s Vegetable Project is one of the most successful projects introduced in my chiefdom,” Paramount Chief Caulker said.

It was conceived as a way to quickly help women earn income again. We started small with 30 women, supplying each with enough peanut seed for a half-acre garden and other vegetable seed like cucumbers and corn. They also got a 50Kg (100-pound) bag of rice to feed their families before their harvest.

Leave it to women to make the best use possible of resources they were given. Most women grew a bumper crop of peanuts in four short months, harvesting 6-7 bags of peanuts for each bag of seed they received.

We jokingly said we were making millionaires out of peanuts. A large bag of peanuts went for 160,000 leones. So, 7 bags are worth over a million leones. Or about US$200.

That may not sound like much, but it was three times more than the women would make in cash in a whole year of traditional rice farming, an incredibly labor intensive crop. And they still had the rest of the year to grow rice and do fishing in the Bumpeh River.

Leave it to these women to be grateful for this help. In these small, close-knit villages of 200-300 people, the women wanted to help other women do what they just did. They came up with the idea of each donating back a half-bag of groundnut seed for the next group to plant. They showed me their donated seed, left.

A local survey found 450 more women in this area of eight villages want to be part of the program. This part of Bumpeh Chiefdom was selected because it has the largest concentration of active women farmers. They were the most severely affected when Ebola abruptly curtailed their normal farming.

Executive Director Rosaline Kaimbay, right, of CCET, our partner organization, distributes seed and supplies to the May 2016 group of women farmers, holding white drying tarps they received on their heads. We bought any seed locally available, saving transport cost for both buyer and sellers.

So, the program is expanding to 150 women per year in two groups of 75 women each in the spring and fall.  The program is meant to be a stopgap measure to help women farmers get back on their feet after Ebola. It will continue for three years and cover all 450 interested women. The women draw lots to select who will be in each group.

The 2014-15 farming year was exceptionally hard with Ebola. The first group of women peanut farmers unfortunately didn’t become self-sufficient with just one peanut crop in 2015. They were forced to eat a large part of their first peanut harvest to avoid hunger. But this allowed them to save some of the previous year’s rice as seed to grow their next rice crop. We’re giving these first 30 women partial support again in the current project to ensure they can make enough profit in 2016 to go from there.

This year we are also giving each woman a large tarpaulin to safely dry their harvest of groundnuts (or peppers) and avoid losses due to rotting.

I’m already looking forward to my next visit when I can join the women and again celebrate their success. I learned the song the women sang for me last November loosely translated said: “If you wake up in the morning and just work hard, you will succeed.”

And succeed these hard-working women did. In only five months after my first long-distance phone call that conceived the project, the women were harvesting a bumper crop. Their success became our success. And now we’re expanding to help more women succeed.

Arlene Golembiewski, Executive Director