Nigeria To Benefit From $10.54bn Islamic Bank Fund For Agriculture

Nigeria will directly benefit from the 2022 Food Security Response Program financing package of $10.54 billion recently approved by the board of executive directors of Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) to develop agricultural sector among member states.

This was made known yesterday in Abuja by Ougfaly Badji, the agriculture and food security lead expert from IsDB headquarters, Jeddah at a regional training workshop on strategic planning and policy development in food security, organised by the Islamic Organisation for Food Security ( IOFS).

According to Badji, the funding will assist  member countries in addressing the immediate impact of the current food and climate crisis and underlying structural challenges to food and nutrition insecurity in the medium to long term.

He said the bank will avail more funding to build the resilience of local production systems and promote climate-smart agriculture, development of commodity value chains that will promote sustainable and profitable smallholder production systems and building of national strategic buffer stocks and reserves for de-risking and reducing price volatility.

To address food security matters which are not properly reflected in policy frameworks of governments, director-general of IOFS, Yerlan Baidauket at the workshop noted that the organisation placed special attention on enhancing the institutional capacity of governments at national levels, along with exchanging knowledge and practices.

He said, “Today’s important event bring together more than 70 government officials from 13 member states and organised under the IOFS “Year of Africa” with the key objective to build the capacity of government officials on basics and practices on strategy development, legislation improvement, creation of government inter-sectoral mechanisms  on food security.

It is to note that upon successful implementation of “Year of Africa”, the IOFS will strengthen the support to programming activities in Africa under the “Africa Food Security Initiative (AFSI)”.

Earlier, minister of state for agriculture and rural development, Hon Mustapha Baba Shehuri commended IOFS for providing expertise and technical know-how to member states on sustainable agriculture and rural development in addressing current issues threatening food security in the world and Africa region.