FG/ World Bank APPEALS empowers over 39, 000 beneficiaries across states

*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’’