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Abdul Kareem Mojeed
Experts said the digitization of advisory services in Nigeria should be human-centred, requiring greater awareness of existing digital tools to drive adoption and use.
Agricultural Values in Nigeria, groups and individuals from his chain met in Kano on Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss ways to tackle food inflation and strengthen Nigeria’s advisory system to make the country’s food system more resilient. rice field.
At our annual stakeholder review workshop, experts spoke on the following topics:
“Building Resilient Food Systems in the Face of Growing Demand and Climate Change” hosted by the Country Office of the Sasakawa African Association (SAA).
SAA Nigeria His Country Director He Godwin Atser said the workshop will allow the organization to hold roundtable discussions with strategic partners in agricultural developmentto review program activities over the past year andimplementation plans envisioned for the new year. He said it provided a great opportunity.
He explained that the Association’s landslide achievements were based on the three main pillars of Regenerative Agriculture (RA), Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture (NSA), Market Oriented Agriculture (MOA) with cross cutting component. “One of the problems is that farmers understand there is a problem. That’s it,” Atser told PREMIUM TIMES as a bystander at the event.
He said there are existing problems of food inflation and low productivity, unlike what farmers used to get, and these are largely caused by the devastating effects of climate change.
Extended service
According to the 2020 African Seed Access Index (TASAI), Nigeria has the lowest proportion of agricultural advisors to farmers in Africa.
The report ranked Rwanda as the country with the highest proportion of advisors to farmers, followed by Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Zambia and Mali. However, Nigeria sits at the bottom of the index alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Uganda and Kenya. Nigeria continued to perform poorly in 2019 compared to her two years earlier.
Over the past decade, Nigeria has struggled to reform its agricultural sector to reduce its dependence on oil and gas.
In March 2021, the government announced that he would hire 75,000 additional staff for advisory services as part of efforts to increase food production.
The USDA said he had 14,000 advisers as of 2019, of whom 6,000 were employed in the public sector and her remaining 8,000 in the private sector. According to the government, the country’s agricultural extension system has been in decline for many years due to declining funding, policy changes, a shrinking workforce and a lack of interest in agricultural entrepreneurship among young people.
In most of the states where the SAA currently operates, there is no recruitment of counseling staff and no motivation to develop them, he said, Atser said.
“Nigeria and some other African countries’ advisory systems are stuck in a vicious circle.
In a presentation, Adegbenga Adekoya, Senior Fellow, Innovation Lab for Policy Leadership in Agriculture and Food Security (PiLAF), University of Ibadan, said that agricultural extension is a real tool for grassroots and public collaboration. I pointed out that it has been recognized many times as. A way to reach rural communities and residents.
He said he was shocked when the World Bank, the initiator of the Agricultural Development Program (ADP), withdrew its nationwide funding.
“To date, his ADP in many governments has not worked as expected,” he said.
Adcoya stressed that expanding agriculture is key to success.