Strengthening the Value Chains against CORONA
In light of the pandemic, the Green Innovation Centres for the Agriculture and Food Sector (GIAE), as part of the Special Initiative One World No Hunger (SEWOH) of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) then launched a Rapid Impact Assessment, in close collaboration with 14 partner countries, to analyze the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the supported agri-based value chains and their actors and to propose interventions to overcome these challenges.
The country package Nigeria identified and prioritized the use of ICT tools as one of the effective measures to increase the resilience of the VC actors. In this unusual situation, digital tools offer agriculture a kind of hope. The progress made with digitalization is supporting essential farm operations, especially with advisory and training services. These underline the importance of agronomic advice on food security.
The ICT measures include the use of 3D animation to complete good agriculture practice (GAP) training for the 2020 cropping cycle and the radio programme. The radio programme is a scale up of the current radio programme in the potato value chain to also include the three value chains of maize, cassava, and rice. Other GIZ programme such as the Pro-Poor Growth and Promotion of Employment in Nigeria Programme, (SEDIN), Competitive African Rice Initiative (CARI) Skills Development for Youth and Employment (SKYE) are also interested in working with GIAE to extend the radio programme beyond the eight states which GIAE is active in.
The next phase of the radio programme will be aired on eight radio stations and broadcast a 24-week interactive radio programs per value chain per state – i.e. Maize (Kaduna and Kano), Rice (Benue, Nasarawa and parts of Cross River States), Cassava (Ogun and Oyo) and Irish potato (Plateau) from August 2020 to August 2021. This will ensure that the interactive radio programme is available in all four value chains for dissemination of agricultural knowledge to smallholder farmers in rural areas to improve productivity and income.
