The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has concluded plans to integrate digital solutions into farming through its Value Chain Development Programme (VCDP).
The Country Director of IFAD, Mrs Dede Ekoue, while speaking with journalists at the Federal Government and the IFAD 10th Supervision Mission of VCDP, said the integration of digital solutions into farming was a result of farmers’ requests at the end of the IFAD meeting in Kenya with stakeholders, including farmers.
She said the farmers identified digital solutions as an element that would improve their production, and IFAD would integrate them into the programme.
“From this assessment that we have done before together with the farmers, one of the elements that the farmers wanted to have enhanced in the production of the VCDP is a digital solution.
“So, we have listened to the farmers, and we have just come back from Kenya, where we were with VCDP.
We are now taking an innovative approach to integrating digital solutions into agriculture so that we can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of our programme”, she said.
Furthermore, she said the VCDP has been very impactful in the areas of productivity increase, increase in production, income generation for farmers, farmers’ resilience to climate change, and integrating youth and women.
“The VCDP is very impactful, and the impact is accessed with data that shows an increase in productivity. That means that the investment made by farmers must yield greater results.
The productivity of the crops has been more than doubled. The second thing is production, which is something that we also monitor.
“The third element that we monitor is income generation. The fourth element is resilience to climate change. We prepare farmers to be more resilient.
We monitor what percentage of farmers are applying this climate-smart agriculture practice and what percentage have access to insurance.
The fifth element is how we integrate the youth and women in the programme”, she said.
Dr Fatima Aliyu, National Programme Coordinator for VCDP, said the supervision mission aims to assess the implementation status of the programme, particularly with regards to the two additional financings, and to track the implementation status of the recommendations from the mid-term review held last year.
She said the supervision mission will also identify implementation challenges and propose solutions to them.
“All these are to ensure that the programme is successfully implemented in order to achieve the objectives of the programme, which are to enhance the food security and livelihoods of poor rural farmers in the rice and cassava value chain.
“This mission is very important because it is going to look into our programme implementation and come up with solutions for us on new ideas that will help us achieve the objectives of the programme, which is to the benefit of our smallholder farmers”, she added.
The Director of the Project Coordination Unit at the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, Musa Bukar, said the VCDP project has improved the productivity as well as the production of rice and cassava farmers in the states where it is being implemented.
“This has impacted us so well; it is part of the reasons why during the COVID-19 lockdown, no rice was imported into the country, yet we were able to feed ourselves; This is a result of the impact of VCDP at the grassroots level,” Bukar noted.
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