Sonia Darracq, Regional Agricultural Adviser, French Embassy in Nigeria, on Wednesday said the French Embassy would train 300 direct and 1000 indirect beneficiaries from two states on best agrifood processing.
Darracq made this known in Abuja at a two-day roundtable on project Support Women Entrepreneurship in the Agrifood Sector in Nigeria (SWEAN) dedicated to support rural agripreneur women.
She said that out of the 300 women, 50 were selected and were trained as trainers expected to pass on their knowledge to more than 1000 beneficiaries.
According to her, SWEAN project is funded by the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs through the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA).
The objective is to enhance the rural women’s skills in producing higher value-added agricultural products and in leading their agri-food enterprises.
” Since the project’s launch on the Sept. 2020, a lot has been achieved to improve agricultural practices in Nigeria.
”Three hundred women from Oyo and Kaduna States have been trained in agribusiness and they have built a greater autonomy, self-empowerment and started to strengthen their networks.
”We made training manual, available in the three major Nigerian languages Yoruba, Hausa & Igbo to increase local assimilation of the content.” she said.
The French Ambassador to Nigeria, Mrs Emmanuelle Blatmann, welcomed the participants to the two-day roundtable dedicated to the remarkable project SWEAN which supports rural agripreneur women.
She said it was a beautiful career to contribute to proper feeding of the people.
Sougrynoma Sore, Head of the Capacity Development Office SWEAN Coordinator, said the SWEAN project had trained about 300 women in Kaduna and Oyo States relating to Agri-food processing in Nigeria, based on the crops and commodities that they produce.
Sore said the project would improve their processing and also enhance their skills in business, marketing branding, food standard certification and so on.
She said the SWEAN project wanted to target women agrifood-processing in Nigeria, with Kaduna and Oyo States as targets.
”We want to work with women in particularly who have lower access to the market so that we can strengthen what they know and how they process their foods.
” We see women dry their garri on the floor, which is not proper. So we will teach them how to do that in a hygienic way. These are the kinds of practical knowledge that we want them to know.
” We are working with SMEDAN, NAFDAC, SON so that they can tell them what it takes to bring a product that is competitive in the market not just locally, but potentially in the international market,” she said
She said the project would create value, revenue, jobs and growth which will attract more youth to the agricultural sector, giving them not only modern technical skills, but also pride and enthusiasm in being farmers.
According to her, the project started in September 2020 and it will end mid 2022 for this particular phase.
“The second phase that we want to work on to out-scale this project, would bring more actors and see how many more women we can train, even including country collaboration.
”The third phase would be to look for more funding for the project and the initiatives of collective platform, and the fourth phase is strengthening the processes that we would develop towards the reform of curricula and training and also the standard within ATVET.
” For the first phase, we had 300 direct beneficiaries and one thousand indirect beneficiaries, for the second phase we definitely want to have more persons because we want to do more states, more countries, so we might be talking about thousands of direct beneficiaries,” she said
Sore said the next step from the meeting would be a collaboration with the French Network of Technical Education in Agriculture to modernise the curricula of the agricultural technical institutions in Oyo and Kaduna States.
She said the two states were the pilot states, then with time it would spread the modules to other states and to the country level, by promoting their integration into ATVET.(NAN).
