FG begins vocational training of technicians in poultry sector

The Federal Government through the National Institute of Animal Science (NIAS) in collaboration with the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), AFOS Foundation and other partners have begun training technicians in the poultry industry on mechanical and managerial skills to drive the subsector.

The Registrar of NIAS, Professor Eustace Iyayi while speaking with Journalists at the Program on the Implementation of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in the Poultry Value Chain, said the meeting was to discuss ways people can acquire skills in the poultry industry and become useful in the development of the subsector.

“We are here to discuss issues around technical vocational education training for the poultry value chain in Nigeria as a way of looking at how people can acquire skills in this subsector and how it can become a very useful tool for wealth creation and employment generation through the poultry business.

“This interests us because we recognise that a population of about 200 million people or more with a maiden age of about 18, which means predominantly, about two third of the population are youth, and not many of them have the opportunity for formal education, so we need to cater for those who don’t have that opportunity for formal education.

“The Institute represents the agricultural and animal husbandry subsector. We believe we can use that as a platform to ensure that people are enrolled in vocational education in animal husbandry, then we turn them into very useful human beings that can help to drive our economy through the agricultural sector,” Iyayi said.

The Director General of the Poultry Association of Nigeria Onallo Akpa, said the Poultry is very peculiar and very interested in the TVET project because the industry is private sector driven and not a theoretical industry.

He said looking at most of the Universities and polytechnics, very few of them want to do agriculture.

“So, we are interested in the TVET project in collaboration with the National Board for Technical Education, the Nigerian Institute of Animal Science and the Poultry Association of Nigeria because we want to build the capacities of technicians in the poultry industry.

“Why we are very much interested in the TVET project is that we want to build the capacities of technicians in the areas of poultry mechanics, feed milling, animal production and so on, we don’t necessarily have to get graduates to be our employee, we want to build capacities of people who are humble, who will form the bedrock of production activities,” he noted.

Ladipo Akoni, Country Representative of AFOS Foundation in Nigeria in his submission, said “we are here today at this stakeholders event because we believe in the skills development of Nigerians, so far we have been collaborating with the poultry sector, the private sector players and also the NGOs and the public sector players in the Nigeria poultry sector where we have been developing series of trainings for the Nigerian agricultural sector.

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