Corporate Farmers International in collaboration with the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) have unveils the agropreneur contestants for the agric reality TV show scheduled to commence soon in Nigeria.
At a media briefing held recently in Lagos, the organisations showcased the twenty agropreneur contestants for the reality show.
“We are here today for a meet with the contestants, to see the faces of those who we will be contesting on our reality TV show. We are working together with IITA, TEF to create something innovating and new to change the face of agribusiness in Nigeria and Africa which we are taking to Asia,” said Akin Alabi, managing partner and co-founder, Corporate Farmers International.
“We are working with TEF on the selection process and they gave us several entrepreneurs who we put on a raid show to check their profile, competency and what they could do and that was the major criteria we used in selecting our contestants for the show. The TV show is basically going to be a month,” said Alabi.
He stated that the initiative will help create platform for youths interested in agriculture to launch their businesses and get necessary training to succeed. “The government have been screaming that we need youth involvement in agriculture so this is one of the major platform that we are creating so that government can see that thousands of youth out there want to do agriculture but there is no platform,” he said.
“We need to create a platform for government to see for them to invest in and that platform must showcase the youth and what they do. It is going to be a yearly thing and it will be extended to other Africa countries after the first season,” the co-founder added.
Speaking also to journalists, Moyosore Awotile, manager of the TEF alumni, said “we went into collaboration with corporate farmers because they approach us indicating that they want to start the first agric TV reality show in Nigeria and that they wanted 20 agribusiness entrepreneurs from us.”
“It was difficult selecting the contestants because all our agribusiness entrepreneurs are top of the chart. We selected them and share their details with corporate farmers and they also went through the agropreneurs details and short lists their process which involves them being on a radio show before the final selection was made,” Awotile said.
At the end of the show there will be an agric reward as prices to winners.
Josephine Okojie
