Women Farmers in Northern States urged to embrace Agriculture as a Business

…as MDCL hosts workshop for stakeholders in the agriculture sector

Women farmers in the Northern part of Nigeria have been challenged to position themselves as a valuable tool in the ongoing quest for national food security through exploring the vast agricultural potential available in the region.

In order to do this, it has been suggested that they can become vital players in Nigerian agricultural development along the value -chain by shifting away from practicing agriculture as a subsistence activity, to embracing it as a business.

This is the major takeaway from a one-day workshop with the theme: ‘Ready to Take Your Agribusiness to the Next Level’ organised by Micro Development Consulting Limited (MDCL), a women’s development support company.

The workshop, which featured the Federal Government Agencies, such as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Bank of Agriculture, Bank of Industry, NIRSAL, as well as Deposit Money Banks, which include the Jaiz Bank, and some DMBs, used the occasion to showcase their various products.

Several presentations and discussions on entrepreneurial mindset for women in agriculture, which range from understanding entrepreneurship in agriculture contexts, shifting from subsistence to agrobusiness thinking, and case studies of women-led agribusiness in Nigeria, were delivered by a range of experts who facilitated the event.

The event facilitators include: Aminu Alhassan Fagge, an associate professor, Centre for Dryland Agriculture, Bayero University, Kano, and Jafar Abubakar Umar, Director-General, Nigerian Agribusiness Group, and other leading women agrobusiness professionals from northern Nigeria.

Speaking to BusinessDay on the sidelines of the workshop, Furera Isma Jumare, founder of MDCL, said the event was organised and designed to empower the participants, who are drawn from Kano, Jigawa, and Katsina, to amplify their voices for inclusion in the Nigerian agriculture space.

She stated that the programme was also designed to enable the participants to appreciate the huge opportunities which agriculture offers to them along the value chains, noting that a lot of women seem not to understand the opportunities opened to them in the sector.

“We want the women to know that in each of the agriculture value chains there are opportunities, from inputs to production, to processing, to distribution, to marketing, and some other activities, like aggregation, logistics, even up to export.

“So, we did this so that the women in the agribusiness can scale and move up to a level so that they can make money in their business. In this workshop, we brought together a total of 46 women from the three targeted states.

“We called the programme Workshop number one, so this is the first workshop on the agricultural value chain. For years, our group has been holding different workshops, but we re-strategised as a business group to focus now on agriculture, especially now, when the Federal Government is placing emphasis on food self-sufficiency.

“We have plan to make this workshop a quarterly event, we will be moving from the level of appreciation of the importance of Agriculture, to scaling it to how to level opportunities in the value chain”, Furera explained.

During a practical component of the training, successful Northern women entrepreneurs, namely: Hajiya Usman Nagado, who is the founder of Nagab Farm, and Hajiya Amina Pindar-Abubakar, a former CBN`s Branch Controller, now turned farmer, and Hajiya Habiba Umaru Sule-Dalhatu, were on hand to provide mentorship for the participants.

Zainab Manzzo, founder of Zahir Farm, based in Kano state, who was one of the participants in the programme, while speaking on the benefits of the event, said that empowerment training has opened her eyes to how she can harness the opportunities that are available in the agriculture sector in Nigeria.

Also, Tina Musa, who is a Commodity Aggregator, stated that the workshop she will be leveraging on the empowerment gained to explore available windows of opportunities in the exportation of processed agro-products.