As part of activities marking this year’s world food day, Oxfam, a non-governmental organization says it has trained 10,000 women in six local government areas Bauchi in order to boost agriculture and fight hunger.
Mr. Samuel Lashom technical officer in charge of business in the organization said the training of the 10,000 women across six LGAs of Shira, Gamawa, Darazo, Tafawa Balewa, Ningi and Alkaleri were to boost agricultural produce and provide food security in the country.
Mr. Samuel who stated this while speaking with journalists on the occasion of the 2020 world food day celebrated by Oxam in Bauchi said his organization is implementing Livelihood and Nutritional Empowerment (LINE) in state.
He said that the main objective of the project is to empower rural household in Bauchi state with pragmatic approaches in order to improve their yields.
The celebrations of the world food day according to Mr. Samuel is an opportunity to make a statement about issues that concerns food security in Nigeria.
“It is also an opportunity to showcase what we have been doing in Bauchi communities. As I speak to you now, we are working in 360 communities in Bauchi state”, he said.
Samuel noted that most of the beneficiaries of their intervention are women “that are small scale farmers whom we support with trainings and linkages.”
He said such trainings revolves around agricultural based practices, health, gender, and training around nutrition.
“Apart from the training we give them, we also try to see how we can support them with agricultural inputs freely. The objective is to increase yield and see how we can use such kinds of platforms in the communities and see how we can fight food insecurity in Nigeria”, Samuel said.
He said Oxfam ensures that the program is “context appropriate in such a way that every location, every community, every local government has its own peculiarity.
“Whatever you see us do in these six local government areas, is based on a report, base line assessment we conducted before the commencement of this project. So, all the indices, all the parameters that were captured during the base line survey”.
On his part, Ado Solomon, the Executive Director of FacePam in his opening remarks said fertilizer distribution has been a great challenge in Nigeria.
According to him, late distribution of fertilizer is the major predator affecting farmers in especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Solomon who decried that farmers did not have access to fertilizer at the right time this year, challenged both the federal and the state governments to work hand in hand to ensure that farmers get fertilizers at the right time.
He said by so doing, it will no doubt, help the farmer to grow their plants and enjoy bumper harvest.
“We as NGOs are only supplementing what government is doing. We have gone to the local governments to reach the women, and if government will do more on its part and with our own collaboration, things will be easier for our farmers”, the executive director pointed out.
Adding that, “we are doing our best and we feel that government should do more, government is doing something but it should do more so that farmers will be happy”.
He opined that once government is able to provide farmers with adequate fertilizer and other farming inputs, Nigeria will have food security.
“Ask a real farmer and he will tell you that he didn’t get fertilizer at the right time this year, the only fertilizer available at the right time was those ones in the market and it was very exorbitant”, Solomon said.
He said “with COVID-19 and other issues, the economic status of the farmers was very low, so people found it difficult to access fertilizer”.
