Raising the bar against poverty in Niger Delta

Some of the leading factors limiting the growth of farmers and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the Niger Delta have been identified, among others, as poor agricultural and business practices and lack of access to latest technologies for production and processing. To address these, the Foundation for Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta (PIND) recently held a well-attended training workshop for 40 service providers in the cassava, palm oil, aquaculture, poultry sectors and SMEs in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital as part of the foundation’s integrated human capacity development models for wealth creation in the oil-rich, but impoverished region.

The service provider’s model is one of PIND’s new market development approaches for boosting economic opportunities and reducing poverty for thousands of farmers and SMEs. Under this approach, PIND has identified sub-sectors in agriculture with high potentials to generate income and create jobs for a significant number of poor people, and it, subsequently, engages clusters of farming associations with large numbers of farmers in these sub-sectors across the Niger Delta.

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PIND trains the lead farmers and service providers selected from the farmers’ associations on best agricultural practices at demonstration farms and they, in turn, train members of farmers’ associations. Similarly, under this model, business support service providers are trained on how to offer market linkages, finance and business advisory services to select Niger Delta-based SMEs.

With this service provider’s approach, PIND has been able to identify and tackle some of the systemic constraints inhibiting growth in the agriculture and MSMEs sectors in a sustainable manner.  Speaking on the Port Harcourt training tagged: Service Providers’ Strategic Planning and Learning Workshop that held between February 5-8, PIND’s Knowledge and Communications Manager, Chichi Nnoham-Onyejekwe, said it was to provide an avenue for PIND to review the performance of the model with service providers, discuss strategies and plan for 2019 and beyond.

Besides equipping the service providers with new skills, practices, and processes, the workshop, she noted, should serve as a platform for networking and promoting synergy among service providers, input companies, agro-dealers, top fabricators and spray service providers, among others across the Niger Delta.

Invariably, over the past six years, PIND has developed training modules, identified and trained over 200 service providers and agro-dealers in the cassava, oil palm, aquaculture and poultry sectors and as of today, the intervention of PIND in human capacity development are yielding good results in the area of poverty reduction and wealth creation in the Niger Delta.

Saturday Tribune gathered that over 50, 000 farmers and processors, who have enjoyed capacity trainings offered by PIND, have increased their productivity and are recording higher yields as a result of improved agricultural practices, access to modern inputs, business practices, information and adoption of new technologies. It was also gathered that over 7, 000 MSMEs are accessing services and finance to upgrade their businesses and expanding into new markets.

Saturday Tribune spoke with organisers of the capacity-building workshop. Speaking on the foundation’s  poverty reduction strategy, PIND’s Market Development Programme Manager, Precious Chidi Agbunno, said the strategy was to grow business innovations, increase the income of small businesses and farmers with a view to reducing poverty.

“We started working with the service providers when they did not have much capacity to do anything in the sector; we just identified the fact that they are actually important in the system. Although a lot of them were doing some other things, we thought that we could work with them to devise and develop solutions that could support the farmers.

Agbunno maintained that PIND, in line with its mandate, is focused on sustainability, training and supporting the participants in a way that they can function in the absence of the foundation, adding that “We don’t really fund them, but give them little grants to enable them expand what they are doing, but they have to do it commercially and get their targets to pay for their services and this way, poverty will be reduced.

PIND’s service provider and active participant at the workshop, Mr Bamidele Ayodele, while speaking on the challenges, listed wrong mindset in the area of sourcing funds and record keeping. According to him, SMEs actors have a mind set that nothing hardly works for them, such that even though over 80 per cent of them needs money to expand their businesses, they believe that amid a pool of funds, it will be difficult to access it. He also noted that, besides some level of illiteracy, SMEs actors loathe keeping record or documentation such that most of them do not have records nor do they register their businesses.

PIND’s Organizer and Market Development Manager, Mr Precious Chidi, underscored the essence of the workshop, saying “we brought them together to have a good understanding of what they are doing, and how we can work together to achieve PIND’s objectives of reducing poverty in the Niger Delta.”

He described the 40 service providers drawn from states in the Niger Delta as PIND’s key partners, agro dealers and input companies whom “We are training their capacity and working through them to reach the farmers and small enterprises.”