WOFAN begins distribution of rice threshers, reapers to farmers

To mark the World Food Day, the Women Farmers Advancement Network (WOFAN) at the weekend kicked off the distribution of 120 rice threshers and reapers to  its members spread across the Federal Capital Territory (FCT),  Benue, Gombe, Nasarawa, Kano, Katsina, Kaduna, Jigawa and Adamawa states.
According to the organisation, the gesture was aimed at uplifting the beneficiaries’ economic independence and self-reliance, also to enhance food security and improve livelihoods of smallholder farmers.
On the WOFAN intervention project tagged,  ‘Icon of Hope’,  the founder/Executive Director, Hajia Salamatu Garba, said the distribution of the machines in each of the centres was followed by the beneficiaries’ training on good agricultural practices, group dynamics and good leadership orientation to enable them transparently carry out their daily functions as a cooperative.
Garba informed that WOFAN is working in collaboration with the agricultural agencies and partners such as United States African Development Foundation (USADF), CARI and Mastercard to provide them support.

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Noting that WOFAN has been providing sundry capacity building supports to rural farmers, particularly women and youth farmers for the past 28 years through diverse intervention programmes, she said the project is specially designed to support farmers scale up ICT-led agricultural production and processing through capacity building.
Garba further noted that before the commencement of the project, rural farmers recorded over 20 per cent loss of harvested rice due to damage from traditional method of threshing as well as additional cost of hiring manual labour.
“With the introduction of rice reapers and  threshers, it’s our expectation that this will reduce time and loss of rice from reaping to threshing and save costs.
“This intervention is in tandem with the vision, development objectives of this administration, aimed at giving agriculture its pride of place as the major mover of our state economy,” she said.
The Street Journal