Stakeholders in the public and private sectors have called for a sustainable public-private partnership (PPP) business model for digital agricultural extension delivery.
They made the call at a stakeholder workshop organised by Sasakawa Africa Association, as part of the launch of a project tagged, “A consultative engagement exercise for product profile design for Nigeria’s public-private partnership digital extension delivery system.
The project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is an engagement exercise and scoping study that will be conducted in Oyo, Gombe, and Kaduna States to identify and profile a digital extension delivery solution that addresses the specific needs of small-scale farmers while promoting gender equality, and enhancing climate resilience in crop and livestock value chains.
The project, being executed by the African Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services (AFAAS) in collaboration with SAA, AGRA, Sahel Consulting, and Africa Practice was launched at the stakeholder workshop with participants from the ministry of agriculture, government agricultural development programmes (ADPs), agro-allied companies, financial sector, tech firms, digital agricultural service providers, non-governmental organisations, donor-funded agricultural programmes and farmer organisations.
Adeola Lordbanjou, director of Federal Department of Agricultural Extension, who declared the workshop open, lamented that the traditional training and visit (T&V) extension approach had become ineffective hence the need for innovative approaches.
“Nigeria currently has an insufficient number of extension agents in the system. As against one extension agent to 500 farmers in the past, we now have one extension agent to 10,000 households.
In addition to that, the T&V extension approach has become ineffective and inefficient. This extension challenge is a major contributor to the low productivity in our agricultural sector,” Lordbanjou said.
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