The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Feed the Future Program has disclosed that it is supporting 600,000 farms in the northeast to enhance financial inclusion and digital agriculture.
The Senior Program Advisor for financial Services for Rural Resilience Activity Mark Akpan disclosed this yesterday in Abuja while speaking at a USAID funded Feed the Future Nigeria Rural Resilience Activity Tech-Enabled Business Model Roundtable with the theme “Driving Tech-Enabled Solutions and Digital Innovations for Competitiveness and Inclusion at Marketplace
He stated that the initiative was designed to promote economic recovery and growth in conflict affected communities in poor states of Northeast Nigeria.
Akpan mentioned that the aim of the roundtable was to bring in key market actors in technology, financial, agric, and business development sector to have a conversation around how technology can be used to improve service delivery, especially to people who are in last mile communities in an era when most economies are going digital.
He said “We want to see how we can be able to support businesses to innovate technologies that can enable Nigerian citizens to assess services with ease and efficiency.We want to target rural communities, and we want to target MSMEs and smallholder farmers who are currently excluded from accessing digitally enabled products and services.”
“We hope that with this meeting today all the market actors that are around, with all the issues that are discussed, will be able to find lasting, innovative solutions that can solve some of the challenges that businesses are facing, as well as places like NorthEast Nigeria and other areas where people are disenfranchised or marginalised.”.
The program Advisor stated they are working in Adamawa, Gombe, Borno, and Yobe state as well as Benue, Nasarawa, Kebbi states and even Abuja so as to provide the necessary support that is required to build resilience and help people to move away from poverty into prosperity.
He disclosed that the program is working with Central Bank of Nigeria FinTrch Companies, financial service providers to develop products that meet the capacity and the ability of women and youths.
He stated that the 3-year program which is now in the third year has so far provided digital literacy, financial literacy and also business development services as well as building the capacity of the youth and the partners that we are working with within these locations.
The Director of Partnership and Coordination, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN)Dr Friday Okpara during his speech titled “The MSME Landscape in the Northeast Nigeria: Challenges and Opportunities” revealed that a survey done in 2020 by SMEDAN and Nigerian Bureau of Statistics exposed that there were 41 million Micro, Small and, Medium Enterprises in 2017 but due to the impact of the 3C’s (Conflict, Climate and Covid) the number has gone down to 39.7million MSMEs as at December 2020″
He stated that “SMEDAN has being promoting digital skill for the Nigerian MSME’s through her ‘digital skill for MSEMs” programme in partnership with Google to facilitate the growth of start-ups and entrepreneurs in area of digital marketing. The program aims to reach out to young men and women with both offline and online training platforms in the country and provide capacity building in the areas of ICT to upscale small enterprises and stimulate business growth”
