FG Moves to Drive Agricultural Devt

Crusoe Osagie

The Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, in collaboration with Synergos (a global non-profit organisation that fights poverty and its effects), held a two-day strategy retreat for Directors in the ministry to unlock institutional effectiveness for the new agriculture sector roadmap – the Green Alternative.

The strategy retreat discussed options and provided guidance on the development of a post 2016/pre 2017-2019 strategic framework for the Green Alternative. The retreat also prioritized in-house findings of key intersections of policy making to enable effective delivery of pre-determined objectives.

In his address at the retreat, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, charged the Directors to make Nigeria a major player in the agriculture sector that could boast of $50 billion annually from agriculture alone. He further urged the participants to “take the matter serious, get to work and do your best to make Nigeria great again.”

He was of the opinion that clear targets must be set for each department in order to promote a culture of accountability.

The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry, Dr. Shehu Idris, in his overview of the Ministry and its parastatals, stressed that the overriding purpose of the retreat was to showcase the power and effectiveness of working as a team to drive the Green Alternative. He added that the next of such retreat will hold along with parastatals of the Ministry for better synergy, drive, delivery and results.

Departmental alignment as the building blocks for delivery of the Green Alternative was stressed at the retreat. To this end, every department in the Ministry made presentations on their mandates and plans for 2017, with focus on alignment with the Green Alternative.

The strategy retreat also witnessed presentations on sustainable change, systems approach, public-private sector engagements and agriculture sector baseline data/monitoring and evaluation framework development. There were also peer review exercise, action planning, and target setting for key strategic objectives.

Resource persons were drawn from the retreat partner (Synergos), the academia and the Ministry.

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