ActionAid Nigeria has started a comprehensive training programme aimed at 120,000 smallholder women farmers (SHWF) and young people in an attempt to foster innovation in smart agricultural techniques.
At the National Summit on Agroecology and Public-Private Partnership on Agroecology held in Abuja, the Deputy Country Director and Director of Programmes at ActionAid Nigeria, Suwaiba Dankabo, disclosed these developments.
She stated that the three-year project is designed to improve food and nutrition security across the country and is funded by the ActionAid International (AAI) Transformative Impact Fund.
Dankabo explained that the project’s focus includes the promotion of agroecological methods, indigenous seed production, and biodiversity conservation to increase agricultural yields. Agroecological model farms will be built and scaled by smallholder women farmers in Ondo, Delta, Ebonyi, Jigawa, and the Federal Capital Territory.
According to Dankabo, the summit would be used to discuss improving agroecology techniques and optimising Nigeria’s farming and food systems to reduce famine. Dankabo highlighted the importance of women and youths in agriculture, pointing out that they make up the majority of the country’s farming workforce.
“So the majority of the food that is sold here in Nigeria, not the commercial quantity that people take abroad, is produced by women, and we are trying to encourage young people to take on farming as a career, taking pleasure in it and going into it with all sense of knowledge and understanding of the rudiments and the value chain so that they can do it to the best of their ability, understanding and then also gaining value for what they are doing so that it will reduce the unemployment rate for the young people in Nigeria,” she explained.
At the end of the summit, she expressed hope and confidence that the National Summit on Agroecology and Public-Private Partnership on Agroecology would set the course for more government funding for agroecology, leading to more government budgetary and political commitments as well as the implementation of agroecology programmes in Nigeria and West Africa.
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