The announcement was made today in Benguela (southern Angola) by USAID Administrator Samantha Power, who believes that Angola can become an agricultural powerhouse at regional level. Samantha Power recalled that the Portuguese-speaking country imports about half of the food it needs, an expense of about three billion dollars a year, and highlighted the impact of the Lobito Corridor, a railway line that crosses Angola from the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo to Lobito on the Atlantic coast, for the agricultural sector. The railway infrastructure, she said, "has the potential to change Angola", connecting farmers to markets where they can sell their products, reduce costs and increase farmers' income. To this end, they need financial resources, technical training, basic literacy skills, she added, which are some of the objectives of the Angolan Women in Agriculture project, which will now be expanded to the three provinces that are part of the Lobito Corridor. USAID initially contributed one million dollars to this initiative, which was joined by three other private sector companies (ExxonMobil, AZULE and Grupo Simples) that would provide another 1.5 million dollars in cash and in kind, and will now invest another five million to cover another 20,000 women. The program is currently underway in the provinces of Malanje, Cuanza Norte, Cuanza Sul, Luanda, Huíla, Namibe and Cuando Cubango, which will be joined by Benguela, Huambo and Bié. According to Samantha Power, the first phase of the project, which covered six thousand women, allowed harvests to triple and revenues to increase sixfold in three years. "We believe that in the partnership between the US and Angola the sky is the limit", highlighted the US official. Samantha Power and US Deputy Secretary of State for Management Richard Verma end a working visit to Angola today, focusing on that US institution's investments in malaria prevention and the Lobito Corridor project. According to a statement by USAID, "the objective is to reaffirm the commitment of the Government of the United States of America in supporting (...) security and good governance in Angola". The document also states that Samantha Power will meet with government leaders, members of civil society and business executives in Luanda. The visit by these two US officials takes place three months after the presence of the US head of diplomacy in Luanda, during which Anthony Blinken stated that the relationship between the two countries is now "stronger and more consequential than at any other time in the past 30 years". Read Also: Antony Blinken wants to "rebuild student exchanges" with China (Portuguese version)