To make agriculture attractive to youths and increase their involvement, the central committee of the Nigeria Agriculture Awards (NAA) has announced the winners for its yearly agricultural youth project and essay competition.
The NAA project and essay competition targeting youths in secondary schools and tertiary institutions across the country with the theme, ‘Building a Crop of Young Agropreneurs’ is aimed at involving a generation of youths that would effectively contribute to the development of the agricultural sector.
During the 2017 NAA awards presentation ceremony held in Lagos recently, cash prices were presented to three groups that emerged winners in the tertiary category as well as to two students from different schools who emerged winners in the secondary school category.
Richard-Mark Mbaram, chief executive officer, Nigeria Agricultural Awards, said that NAA saw the need to bring the youths on board because it realised that they are the missing developmental keys to the chain that is called the value chain in agriculture.
“When you have the bulk of farmers and players in the agricultural space at around the age of 60 and they are on their way out, then you have got a challenge on your hand. Yet you have to feed more people and you realise you have to do something very desperate and here we are desensitising them from joining the agricultural space. We, therefore, decided that we need to bring in a component that has to do with youths,” Mbaram said during the award presentation.
“We have two categories, which is tertiary and secondary category. For the tertiary category, we told them to bring themselves into maximum of three by identifying a problem area in agriculture space and proffer solutions to it and give us the timeline their intervention will make headway in the sector.
“For the secondary schools we told them to imaging themselves as the Minister of Agriculture of Nigeria and should write an essay and tell us what they would do to develop the sector and we got wonderful ideas from these youths,” he added.
In the tertiary category, Smart Farms team which comprises of Mamud Abdulrasaq, Balogun Idris Abayomi and Yusuf Falawiyo emerged winners of the overall star prize of N1 million, while Digital team comprising of Ogunbiyi Yusuf Gbenga, Salawu Saheed and Abiodun Ogundijo won the second prize of N500, 000 and the UNILAG team which consists of Adoh Tobechukwu, Moses Adeyemo Seun and Bamidele won the third prize of N250, 000.
In the secondary school category, Ndebilite Amarachi won the first prize of N250, 000 while Marvellous Adelaja emerged as the second best and got N150, 000.
Mbaram who was earlier quoted commended Akinwunmi Adesina, president, African Development Bank (AfDB) for giving NAA the required support, given his understanding of what NAA is doing and the value it is bringing to the agriculture sector.
“Having started AgroNigeria, we found that there was need to glamourised the sector to find a way to reward people for their effort in the sector as it was done in entertainment with red carpet and I said we can come up with a green carpet as well. So we started the NAA,” he said.
The essay and project competition positively attracted a sizeable number of youths from different parts of the country and was sponsored by Triton Group.
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