The National Project Coordinator of the Agro-Processing, Productivity Enhancement and Livelihood Improvement Support Project (APPEALS), Alhaji Mohammed Jobdi, on Wednesday disclosed that the project had supported a total of 55, 864 farmers since its implementation nationwide.
The Coordinator, who gave these figures during the progress monitoring meeting of the project implementation in Abuja with the World Bank Task Team, disclosed that a total of 75 aggregation and cottage processing centres were being constructed across the states.
This is even as he hinted that the project was constructing about 80 kilometers of farm access roads and energy infrastructure linked to production and processing clusters in some select locations in the country.
While reporting that the participating states have been making progress in the implementation of activities under the various components of the project, Jobdi also puts the number of Value Chain Investment Plans (VCIPs) being implemented across the states at 2,892.
According to him, the projects have been contributing to the national food basket across the different value chains in the year under review.
Specifically, he said that “for instance, cocoa output increased by 129.01 per cent, while poultry egg, cassava, rice and poultry meat increased by 48.3 per cent, 24.7 per cent, 23.8 per cent, and 7.6 per cent respectively.”
Jobdi gave the number of farmers adopting improved technologies as 33,857 with females constituting about 36% even as he maintained that the project was linking farmers to markets through the facilitation of commercial partnerships, resulting in a total of 303 business alliances.
The National Project Coordinator also explained that with 145 off-takers already buying the farmers’ produce across the 11 value chains, the value of the value chain transactions stood at N23.439 billion at the end of year 2022.
