Kaduna Women Vegetable Farmers Hail HortiNigeria Over Training

Gidan Duna Women Multipurpose Association of Ikara local government area of Kaduna State, which is into vegetable farming, has expressed its appreciation to HortiNigeria for providing them with the needed training in vegetable farming, which is helping them sustain their families.

HortiNigeria was founded by the Embassy of the Kingdom of Netherlands in Nigeria and implemented by the International Fertilizer Development Centre (IFDC) in partnership with East-West Seed Knowledge Transfer (EWS-KT), Wageningen University and Research (WUR) and KIT Royal Tropical Institute.
The project is a four-year programme covering Kaduna, Kano, Oyo, and Ogun states, with the aim of facilitating transformation and building sustainable and inclusive horticulture in Nigeria.

Leader of the women farmers group, Mrs Mary Yakubu, expressed her appreciation of the group when the HortiNigeria programme director, Mohammed Salasi Idris, visited their community as a follow-up to training provided for the women and as part of activities climaxing the 2024 Horticultural Week.

Mrs Yakubu said, “We are 35 women as members of the Multipurpose Association, but 20 of us have so far embraced vegetable farming, and HortiNigeria trained us, and today we are reaping dividends of the training for which we are grateful” she stressed.

She said they encourage more women and men to join vegetable farming “because today, we can take care of our families and are better off than we were before taken to vegetable farming.”

Speaking earlier, the program director, Mr Idris, expressed joy with the women for embracing vegetable farming to better their lives and encouraged them to recruit more women and men into vegetable farming.

Fielding questions from journalists who were on his entourage to places visited such as the Learning site at the Faculty of Agriculture, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria, and the SIMKAY Foods Limited also in Zaria before proceeding to Ikara local government area, all in Kaduna State said, “the project is a collaboration between the government of Nigeria and the Netherlands and it is one of the support that the Netherlands has provided to Nigeria since 2021.

“Our mission is simple; we have engaged with these communities for years. We engage communities, organise them, and try to ensure that these communities can increase their productivity, yield, and income through some basic practices such as how to produce tomatoes, onions, pepper, and Okro.

“They have their farming practices, and we also developed some improved practices on how they will produce and yield better by adopting eco-efficient best practices. So, we are here to follow up to see the training we provided to these communities some months ago that was well received. We are very happy that they have not only accepted this, but many farmers you have seen have adopted these practices, and you will think that experts managed these farms”.

“We have the producers here. Earlier on, we went to SIMKAY Foods, which would offtake the produce from the farmers so that all the post-harvest losses are significantly reduced or, if possible, eliminated within Kaduna. Hopefully, we will have more of these SMEs off-take tomatoes and other products, so we don’t have to waste anymore. We have no reason to waste. We don’t have enough, so we cannot afford to waste vegetables, especially tomatoes. That’s one of the project’s main goals,” he stressed.

The HortiNigeria program director, while at SIMKAY Foods, took a brief from the Team Lead Rejoice Amarachi Usim of what it entails there and a facility tour of the tomatoes and other vegetable processing companies, which he said has greatly helped to reduce post-harvest losses of vegetables.

Also, the Kaduna State Chairman of the National Association of Tomato Growers, Processors and Marketers, Mallam Rabiu Aliyu Zuntu, applauded the Kingdom of Netherlands through HortiNigeria for the various intervention in the farming sector.