Firm Unveils Training Academy to Address Agric Mechanisation Skills Gap

AGCOMS International Trading Limited has launched the AGCOMS Academy, a training institution aimed at building skilled manpower for Nigeria’s agricultural mechanisation sector.

The chief executive officer of AGCOMS, Chijioke Okoli, said the Academy was set up to address a shortage of personnel trained to operate, maintain and manage agricultural equipment, noting that more attention had gone into acquiring machinery than into preparing people to use it.

“Machines are the easy part. The hard part, the part that decides whether a tractor works a thousand hectares or sits rusting behind a shed, is the person operating it and the business running it,” Okoli said.

He said the Academy would focus on building the capacity needed to translate investment in machinery into productivity and viable agricultural businesses.

AGCOMS, a dealer of agricultural equipment, said it had trained more than 380 people across the public and private sectors before setting up the Academy.

The company has also been involved in training tractor operators under the National Agricultural Development Fund’s mechanisation programme, including an initiative to train up to 4,000 operators ahead of the deployment of 2,000 John Deere tractors.

According to Okoli, the Academy’s first programmes will target equipment operators and technicians, mechanisation-service entrepreneurs, and managers of agricultural operations. Its first course, on Mechanisation Enterprise Management, is scheduled to begin in Abuja in November. The Academy said it plans to later add programmes for supervisors, business owners and executives.

“You do not mechanise a country by shipping in equipment alone. You mechanise it by building the people who make the equipment productive before they arrive,” Okoli said.

According to him, training would be based on practical, equipment-based instruction drawn from AGCOMS’s field experience in servicing and deploying agricultural machinery.

The launch follows continued efforts by the federal government and other stakeholders to expand agricultural mechanisation as part of measures to raise productivity and improve food security.