World Bank supports 11, 000 tomato farmers in Kano

In the last 10 months, the FADAMA II Additional Financing project financed by the World Bank has supported 10845 farmers comprising 585 youths, 1575 females and 8685 males.

The support, according to Kano State Coordination Office of the programmewas facilitated through the signing of memorandum of understanding between Dangote Tomato Company and Fadama Production Cluster Group on profitable marketing of tomato.

In its Project Implementation Report presented to the Dr. Adetunji Oredipe-led World Bank/FGN 6th Mission on Fadama II Additional
Financing (AF), which visited Kano State, the State Project Coordinator, Alhaji Sha’aibu Sulaiman,saidthe project similarly, in 2016 cropping season, recorded a disbursement of 89, 195 and 110 for rice, sorghum and tomato production groups respectively.

Sorghum and rice farmers were equally well linked to Grand Cereal and popular rice farm off takers and through collaboration with ICRISAT, sorghum farmers were also linked to Honeywell Company, demanding 150,000mt of sorghum from Fadama farmers in Kano.

In its effort to meet up with the objective of providing employment to youth, the project has prepared four spraying groups comprising ten members each earn a living of N58,500 per month for each person. In order to build the capacity of farmers toward efficient production, twelve consultants on capacity building have been engaged and they have conducted the Train-of-Trainers seminars for 120 Farmers across eight production clusters of rice, sorghum and tomato.

After screening of 20 youth and women processing groups, eight were supported with tricycles and processing machines. Additionally, eight groups on tomato were also supported with crates.

Kano is among the six core states chosen to participate in Fadama III AF Project, possessing a comparative advantage of large irrigable land and irrigation facilities, high production potentials and large market, as well as Kadawa, the largest producers of tomato in Nigeria. This provided Kano with an advantage to promote sorghum, rice, and tomato value chain over other core states.