Agriculture

Kwara: Small-scale women farmers seek training for food sufficiency

Women farmers in Kwara state, under the aegis of the Small scale Women Farmers Organisation in Nigeria (SWOFON) has asked the state government to provide more training opportunities for them to enhance their productivity.

This was part of the recommendations given by the farmers while presenting their scorecard on access to training to SWOFON members by the Kwara state government from 2021 to 2023.

The women spoke through the Budget Committee Group (BCG), which analysed the annual agriculture budget of the state for 11 years with support from ActionAid Nigeria.

The BCG, which is a group of agriculture-inclined and policy-driven Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), said through its assessment that it discovered that there was no budgetary provision for women farmers or their training in 2021 and 2022.

The BCG’s spokesperson, who is also the Executive Director of Centre for Community Empowerment and Poverty Eradication (CCEPE), Abdurrahman Ayuba, said that the group noted that in 2023, N3,000,000 was allocated to Women in Agriculture.

”Despite the non-budgetary provision for training for women farmers in 2021 and 2022, the farmers admitted they were trained which suggests that they were trained with external support or extra-budgetary.

”But for improved productivity, there should be increased budget allocation for training in the yearly agriculture budget and total release to provide for smallholder women farmers.

”They should also be consulted in the design of training programmes modules and implementation and their invitation and participation should cut across all local governments across different crops.

”There should be timely invitation for training especially for rural dwelling smallholder women farmers through multiple means”, the group advised.

The BCG added that farm inputs should be distributed yearly to support and increase their productivity in the state.

They added that civil society organizations (CSOs) should be involved in policymaking processes to ensure that the proper training needs of farmers are adequately captured.

In her response, the Managing Director, Kwara Agriculture Development Programme (ADP), Hajia Khadijat Ahmed, said it was important for the smallholder women farmers to identify the extension workers in their local governments for ease of communication to the office.

The Director, Admin and Training Kwara ADP, Mr. Aliu Aiyelabegan said though the mandate of the office was for rural farmers, but paucity of funds limits the execution of programmes.

Corroborating his claim, the Director, Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, Mrs. Dorcas Taiwo, said that there were no financial backups for the training memos received.

She added that her department could not perform its monitoring duties effectively bacuse there are no facilities to do so.

The scorecard was produced under the Scaling Up of Public Investment in Agriculture (SUPIA) project funded by ActionAid Nigeria and implemented by CCEPE.

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