UNDP Armenia To Help Carry Development Projects For Rural Communities

Yerevan, January 30, Armenpress: The UNDP Armenia Office will help implement this year a set of rural development programs in three Armenian provinces.
Particularly, it will help restore the irrigation network of the village of Lusadzor in Tavush province. As a result 50 hectares of land will receive irrigation water. This particular project will be implemented with the financial support of the Italian government as part of a broader reprogram for elimination of rural poverty. The village will also have a new drinking water network.

Vrezh Jijian, UNDP program coordinator, told Armenpress that the village does not have a drinking water system now and the villagers use two springs instead. The work will be started in March and end in August.

The other targeted rural communities are in the Ashotsk region of the northwestern price of Shirak. Last year the government of Norway helped establish there agricultural machinery pool to serve Bavra, Saragyugh, Sizavet and Tavshut villages.

In the framework of that project, the old Soviet-time pool was fully renovated and a fleet of several brand new machinery units have been provided including four Belarus-made wheeled tractors, one plough, a tractor-mounted mowing-machine, a baling press, a potato combine and an automated potato-planter.

Due to the new equipment, many of the plough-lands which were used previously as natural hayfields and were not cultivated properly now are available for grain crops and potato growing. This will significantly increased the per-hectare gross yield, which will be incomparably higher than the yield from hayfields.
The agricultural machinery pool will serve all the four communities of the cluster. Primary beneficiaries of the pool are the socially vulnerable families of the four villages the total number of which makes around one hundred households. These four villages will receive new agricultural machinery this year as well.

An agricultural machinery pool, a flour mill and a seed station will be established also with the help of the UNDP for the village of Yeghvard in southern province of Syunik.
Vrezh Jijian said they expect also funds this year to start reconstruction of a drinking water network in the village of Pokr in Meghri region of Syunik.