Actionaid Nigeria has rated Kogi, Bauchi, Ebonyi, Delta, Kwara and the Federal Capital Territory low in its recent assessments of agricultural extension service performance, while it gave fairly pass marks to Gombe and Ondo States.
The Food and Agriculture Programmes Coordinator for ActionAid Nigeria, Azubike Nwokoye, who presented outcome of his findings to farmers, yesterday in Abuja, lamented that poor funding and lack of sufficient training of extension workers were some of the factors militating against food surplus in the country.
Nwokoye further identified lack of mobility and transport allowance to enable extension workers move around as snags affecting the sector.
The Programmes Officer called on the federal, states and local governments, to pay more attention to extension service providers so as to scale up food sufficiency and increase the country’s earnings.
He, also, made a case for women farmers by calling on relevant authorities to incorporate them into extension service providers.
He added: “The essence of this gathering is actually to show the latest data we have on the level of access extension services in Nigeria. And the challenges of poor funding of the extension services and the components of agriculture for us to push for increased funding.
“It is also to indicate areas of extension services because it is the fulcrum of agricultural productivity. Over the years, farmer agent ratio has been very poor; there is a wide gap and some of the statistics are showing that in Nigeria you have one extension agent to 2,500 family farms.
“In some situations, one extension agent to ten thousand farms. Latest, people that have done it are saying ten thousand extension agents to eighteen thousand family farms.
“So, the gap is wide. There is also in existence the challenge of low recruitment, lack of mobility and transport allowance and lack of training and low number of female extension agents across Nigeria.
“So, we are having this conversation to make sure the poor funding situation is addressed within this budgetary process that is currently ongoing in the 2022 agriculture budget.
“We believe that it is a waste of our common wealth if government, both at the federal and state levels have extension agents that they cannot provide them with motorcycles and transport allowance to do their job.
“It means that when they pay them at the end of the month without providing them money for operation, government is wasting our common wealth.
“It is better for government not to waste our common wealth by ensuring that trainings and retraining are provided for extension agents and that they are provided with proper mobility to be able to deliver this services to the farmers.
“Across Nigeria, we have a lot of technological research that are lying on the shelves. Because of the low funding of extension services, these technologies are not distributed to farmers.
“From the database of our assessment we did recently, it showed that information service to farmers across is not up to 50%. Farm demonstration is about five point something percent.
“A lot of things need to be done in terms of real investment in agriculture with focus on component like extension services.”
Credit: The Sun
