Nigeria and two other African countries are to benefit from the African Development Bank’s (AfDB) $937,000 project aimed to create jobs and improve livelihoods for the youth.
The multinational project, Creating Sustainable Youth MSMEs Through Urban Farming (SYMUF), will support young farmers in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Uganda, who are attracted to urban farming.
“The SYMUF project has received $937,000 in grant funding from the Fund for African Private Sector Assistance, a multi-donor trust fund managed by the African Development Bank,” AfDB stated.
SYMUF, which is under the bank’s Empowering Novel Agri-Business Led Employment (ENABLE) youth programme, will use business incubators and financial products to help transform startup micro, small- and medium enterprises into bankable ventures.
It will also provide youths with agribusiness and technical skills, including climate-smart agriculture practices, technologies, market networks, and professional mentorship.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the youth unemployment rate surged to 53.40 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020 from 40.80 percent in Q2 2020.
While unemployment generally remains a drawback, Nigeria is also faced with growing levels of food insecurity, reversing years of development gains, and threatening the country’s achievement of Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
A panoramic view of the food situation in Nigeria reveals that households spend a quarter to half of their budget on food and with the recent hike in food prices, the percentage has skyrocketed, resulting in the majority of persons starving and unable to afford their daily meals not to talk of eating a healthy, safe and nutritious meal.
In a chat with our correspondent, Ikechi Agbugba, a senior lecturer at the department of Agriculture and Applied Economics, Rivers State University, said Nigeria’s situation calls for an emergency.
He said, “Governments, world leaders, private and public enterprises, research and science communities, local farmers, and all stakeholders involved are to ignore their differences and through concerted efforts bring to the fore, the mechanisms, strategies, policies, finance, and innovative solutions to help avert the impending food catastrophe that threatens our collective existence as a people.”
Lamin Barrow, the director general of the AfDB’s Nigeria Country Department, was quoted in a speech as saying that “the bank is committed to creating jobs and providing incomes for African youth, who are attracted to urban agriculture but do not get jobs, capital, or credit to operate their agribusinesses.”
“This project will address unemployed youth and those in the early start-up stage who have not gained traction due to limited skills and financial resources,” Barrow added.
The AfDB is partnering with a consortium of incubation centres in participating countries to implement the project.
In Nigeria is the Africa Projects Development Centre (APDC), while the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA-Bukavu) in the DRC, and the African Agribusiness Incubation Network in Uganda.
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