African Development Bank (AfDB) in its continued efforts at providing fund for youths in agriculture would be investing about $300 million as part of innovative funding mechanism for youths in agric-led employment initiative.
The funding as revealed by the minister of state for agriculture, Heineken Lokpobori, would help develop the country and encourage young graduates to embrace agriculture and approach it as businesses.
Speaking at a workshop organised by AfDB in collaboration with IITA, Lokpobori said the youth programme would be implemented in the 36 states of the federation, adding that the ministry would develop criteria on how it would be run.
“Part of what we are saying is to provide access to funding to youth and that is why we welcomed the proposal from the AfDB to provide an investment of about $300 million.
“Since we came on board this is the first project we are about to look at, but some of these things cannot be funded from the budget and that is why we welcomed initiatives like this one
“Besides this one, I also spoke about the 2.5 billion dollars in collaboration with the Islamic bank investment that they are proposing with us. When that comes, chunk of this money will also be channelled to youth, women and then also other interested people,’’ he said.
The minister ensured that the present administration have decided that there will be no policy summersault in the ministry, saying that the policies by the past minister will be continued.
He said: “What we are doing is that we will keep reforming them as the need arises. In the next few weeks we will be able to provide our own new road map for agriculture towards Nigeria attaining self-sufficiency in different stable crops between 2018 and 2019.”
Lokpobori explained that because of the policies implemented on cassava plantation in country Nigeria now ranked the highest producer of cassava in the world.
He noted that the federal government was in the process of procuring about 18 to 20 cassava processing plant mills from China so as to further boost the production in the country.
“We are promoting more people to go into cassava production in the country and I believe all these government initiatives will continue to encourage the youth in Agribusiness,’’ he said.
Also, Chiji Ojukwu, director, Agriculture and Agro Industry Department, AfDB, said the goal of the programme was to contribute to job creation, food security and nutrition and improve youth livelihood.
Ojukwu said the programme would be strictly for young graduates in the country as there were lots of unemployed graduates with nothing to do.
“Resources are limited and you need to be selective, in the ADB as we presented earlier we have Job for youth programme which covers both graduates and non-graduates. This covers the area of ICT, Agriculture and Manufacturing that cuts across all youths because fund is been established for that.
“But for the ENABLE Youth Programme, we are a bit specific because there are so many young unemployed graduates. This is what we call “capturing the low hanging fruit’’, this people can be trained quickly and they can apply the training into the business,’’ he said.
According the director, when these graduates are trained and they set up businesses, they will also bring in others that they can train as part of the process.
He also added that going by the trend of ICT in the world today, ICT would be given keen consideration in the implementation of the programme
Join BusinessDay whatsapp Channel, to stay up to date
Open In Whatsapp
