Garça de Cima is local community located in Ribeira Grande Municipality, Santo Antão Island. The community livelihood is mostly based on small fruits / farming production. Nonetheless, most of the yearly production is sometimes lost, due to the community limited capacity to take advantage of the surpluses coming mainly from the fruit trees, especially mangoes. The Garça de Cima community has for example more than three thousand mango trees, with a capacity to produce 10 tons of mangoes annually.

There are huge amounts of losses every year, mainly mangoes, papayas, and guavas, etc. is mainly because of the limited capacity to invest and to transform fruits, limited training on transformation, appropriate packing and transportation.

Therefore, the local association proposed solution to transform and appropriately pack fruits and their commercialization through the implementation of an agro-processing unit that, in addition to promote local development it will create employment and improve living conditions of the community of Garça de Cima. It will in addition guarantee food and nutritional security of vulnerable families. The transformation will also reduce the impact of mosquitoes' proliferation due to the large amount of rotting fruit on the ground.

The project will directly benefit 32 families but indirectly all local community residents. The project has support from the Delegation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment, Employment and Vocational Training Center, Municipality of Ribeira Grande, PARES Cooperative, and Cova, Paúl and Torre Natural Park.