Blessing Ibunge in Port Harcourt
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) working with the federal government and other partners has announced $600,000 (N258m) as support for Agric Entrepreneurs flood-victims in the Niger Delta.
The fund was intended to cushion the sufferings of youth and women agric entrepreneurs in the region whose businesses were swallowed by the ravaging flood menace this year.
Announcing the support in Port Harcourt, Rivers State capital, at the third Livelihood Improvement Family Enterprises for Niger Delta (LIFE-ND) mission workshop, the Country Director, Dede Ekoue, noted the need to enhance resilience to climate change and to build the recovery capacity of the most affected agro-entrepreneurs.
The Country Director said the supervision mission took account of the particularly challenging environmental impact of both youth and women beneficiaries, the most glaring and threatening being flood.
She mentioned the war in Ukraine, the challenges linking fuel and the foreign exchange rates to businesses around the world as some of the impacting factors to beneficiaries of the scheme in their striving to groom agro-businesses.
Ekoue mentioned key areas of achievement of the LIFE-ND, saying that more than 2,000 youth and women had established their businesses as agro-entrepreneurs. He added that some of them were already helping to train others.
“Another 5,000 youth and women are now in the incubation process (in training) and they will be independent agro-entrepreneurs in 2023. The project has also enhanced the productivity of several value chains including cassava, rice, palm oil, and fisheries,” Ekoue said.
Another milestone, according to the Country Director, is that LIFE-ND has rehabilitated several infrastructural facilities such as roads, bridge, small scale irrigation, and plantain sucker chamber of 30 sites of 334 hectares of land for the incubatees.
The national project coordinator of LIFE-ND, Sanni Fatai Abiodun, who gave insights, said the overall goal of LIFE-ND is to realise a transformed rural economy in the Niger Delta from which the rural population can derive prosperity and equal benefit, It will achieve by enhancing income, food security and job creation for rural youth and women through agri-enterprise development on a sustainable basis.
The project which would be in two phases of six years each costing a total of $129.17m (N54.4Bn) targets the nine states that make up the Niger Delta but has been limited to only six states due to failure in counterpart funding.
He said: “In each state, LIFE-ND covers 10 local council areas and 10 communities per LGA based on defined criteria. Overall, the project currently works in 60 LGAs and 600 communities across the six implementing states.
Overall, the project targets 50 per cent male and 50 per cent female participants. Incubators are identified on the basis of their involvement in market linkage activities; adoption of out-grower model; experience in the incubation of new enterprises; and technical, financial, managerial and infrastructure capacity to provide enterprise incubation services to apprentices,” Abiodun added.
