*Emphasizes collaborations
The Agro-Processing, Productivity Enhancement and Livelihood Improvement Support (APPEALS) has revealed that a total of 39,209 direct beneficiaries of male and female with 60.84 and 39.16 percentages respectively have been economically empowered through the project .
This was disclosed recently by the APPEALS Project
Operations Manager (POM), Dr. Salisu Garba during a 2-day training workshop
organized for journalists on rural development communication in Nasarawa state.
Garba said
also that the project has 196,045 indirect beneficiaries who benefited in 87
Business Alliances cum out-grower schemes that are established across the six
participating states in the numeric order of Kano-25, Cross River – 19,
Kaduna-16, Lagos-18, Enugu-5 and Kogi-4
.
Presenting
the project's overview, the POM said the APPEALS project has empowered 8,078 youths
and women in business acumen, technical and life skills training that would enhance
business planning, business registration in Corporate Affairs Office with a
start-up grant to establish a viable business.
He also
mentioned that the project had provision for people with disabilities and special
needs, adding that 5% of the total number of Women and Youths Empowerment
Programme (WYEP) were among the beneficiaries of 10,000 representing at least
500 from the International Development Association (IDA).
Garba said that the WYEP beneficiaries are
open to choosing any other value chains, but within the selected priority areas
of the project. This flexibility has
enabled the youths to select commodities of high sustainability with quick returns
on investment and a high potential for foreign exchange generation and wealth
creation.
He however
said that a lot of achievements have been recorded in about three states of
Kano, Kaduna, and Cross River where a total of about 5,052 farmers had been
linked to market outlets, adding that the project assessment at the February
2021 review meeting at all the value chains had recorded productivity increase
above the targeted 35% with 48.9%.
For example
according to him, the data from processed cassava, rice, aquaculture, and wheat
have shown an average increase of 47.7%, saying this is higher than the expected increase in processed output of value chains of forty percent just as
the project has provided 25 agribusiness clusters out of the 50 targets of the
project with infrastructures like boreholes, box-culverts, and tube wells.
Earlier, the National Project Coordinator of the Project, Alhaji Mohammed Sani Jobdi has said the workshop is a crucial part of the collaboration with relevant institutions like the media towards ensuring smooth and successful implementation of the project stressed that "capacity building and support to collaborating institutions is a key component of the APPEALS Project, with the broad aim of building the capacity of collaborating partners and stakeholders that are participating in the implementation of the project, so as to promote knowledge sharing and facilitate the exchanges of experiences’’
Jobdi added "Our
strategic communication approach is to consolidate our relationship with the
media, to utilize available communication channels to facilitate the realization
of the project development objective, which is to enhance the agricultural
productivity of small and medium-scale farmers and to improve value addition
along the priority value chains in the participating states’’
No comments:
Post a Comment