Agriculture

NYFN Seeks For More Participation Of Youths In Agriculture

Published

6 years ago

October 2, 2020

Joel Ajayi

The Nigeria Young Farmers Network (NYFN) is seeking for more participation of Nigerian youths in embracing agriculture in order to reduce insecurity, unemployment, and another social menace.

The National Coordinator of NYFN, Promise Amahah who made this call during a peace full rally in Abuja, explained that the goal of the president is to lift over millions of Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years and that can only be achieved when young people get involved in agriculture.

According to him, youth across the country lack knowledge about the opportunities in agriculture, lack knowledge of business opportunities in agriculture.

He added that they don’t understand that agriculture is a source of wealth creation.

‘’We are represented from a different state, we have members across that 36 states of Nigeria, we are in every local government and every ward actively and our major tool is information and data, without data we won’t be able to do much in agricultural development, so we are gathering data of young people across the country to know their interest and to connect them to the opportunities in the agricultural value chain and that is what we are set to do.

‘’We are also partnering with the federal ministry of agriculture to be able to achieve this and also to leverage on government programs already on agriculture, so we are everywhere in the country, we are over 2 million and going and we expect that by the end of the year we must have reached 10 million.

‘’The goal of the president is to lift over millions of Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years and we can only achieve that when our young people get involved in agriculture. Agriculture is the highest employer of labour and agriculture is the quickest tool out of poverty, with agriculture, most problems will be solved and that’s why we are here.

‘’What we found that is the major challenge is lack of knowledge, young people nationwide lack knowledge about the opportunities in agriculture, lack knowledge of business opportunities in agriculture, they don’t understand that a lot of wealth can be created through agriculture and most of us who are already engaged in agriculture are doing very well and living comfortably., ‘’ he said.

The Director of Federal Department of Agricultural Extension (FDAE) Engr. Frank Satimari while speaking with pressmen said that the government is interested in mobilizing and sensitizing youths for agriculture.

Satimari who was represented by the Deputy Director of FMARD, Muhammad Bashiru explained that FDAE was to train and deploy75,000 youths aimed towards creating new skills and generate job for the teeming population of unemployed youths in Nigeria, to increase the productivity of farmers through continual access to information, innovation, and technology for improved practices in the agricultural value chain.

His Words:“We are concerned with mobilizing the youth for agriculture. That is why the Ministry currently mandated the Federal Department of Agricultural Extension (FDAE) to train and deploy 75,000 young farmers ratio. The objective is to create new skills and generate jobs for the teeming population of unemployed youth in Nigeria, to increase the productivity of farmers through continual access to information, innovation, and technology for improved practices in the agricultural value chain.

‘’In this regard, the youth population in Nigeria is encouraged to embrace agriculture as a profitable venture by engaging in various forms of agricultural activities within the respective sub-sectors and value chains.

‘’Agriculture has always been an innovative sector. But we need to improve faster through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) if we are to achieve our goals.

‘’It is a known fact across the globe that for a country to attain growth and development, its economy has to be diversified. Mono-economy needs to give way to the productive development of various sectors of the economy.

‘’The fundamental challenges we face today is not how to produce more but how to produce better. I want to stress that innovation in agriculture is the key priority to tackle food insecurity and unemployment in Nigeria.

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Agriculture

PULA Co-founder , Goslinga Urges Flood Insurance Expansion to Safeguard Nigerian Agriculture

Published

1 week ago

November 1, 2026

The Gleamer

Joel Ajayi

For millions of smallholder farmers in Nigeria, a single flood can erase a season of hard work in hours. It is this risk that agricultural insurance firm, Pula, has spent the last 12 years trying to solve across Africa.

Rose Goslinga, Co-founder and President of Pula, who was in Nigeria this week, says while the company has made inroads, it is barely scratching the surface in a country of over 200 million people.

Speaking in an interview in Abuja, Goslinga traced the genesis of the company to a simple but devastating reality for African farmers.

“So Pula is a company that started about 12 years ago and we started working on a problem of climate risk. So the risk that farmers do plant but at the end of the season, not to any fault of their own, there could be a drought, there could be flooding, like lots of flooding. And you may have done everything right. You may have planted the seed, you may have worked your farm, but if there is a flood you could lose everything,” she said.

She explained that the company’s model is built on data that allows insurers and reinsurers to underwrite those risks.

“We knew that there was enough data to protect those farmers, to get those risks underwritten by insurers and reinsurance companies. And so we started with that idea to ensure those farms,” she said.

According to her, Pula now operates in 13 African markets, and in Nigeria it partners with leading underwriters including Leadway and AXA Mansard to insure farmers against flood and other climate risks and to pay out when losses occur. The company has recently expanded beyond insurance into using its data to give farmers market access, as seen in its work with cocoa farmers in Cross River State.

On the general apathy towards insurance in Nigeria, Goslinga admitted the perception is a major hurdle.

“Farmers will think that insurance is for rich people with cars, right? That’s how they think about insurance – is for people who own a car, people who are better off. We think about insurance as something that farmers may not necessarily want but that they definitely need,” she said.

To overcome this, she said Pula embeds insurance into services farmers already seek out – credit, seeds and fertilizers – through aggregators.

“So we work together with organizations that reach these farmers, whether they are farm aggregators. In Nigeria we work together with Babban Gona, with AFEX, with Thrive Agriculture, those organizations that are giving them loans and we package insurance together with those loans because when the rains come they want seeds, they want fertilizers, they’ll not necessarily ask for insurance but if they lose their crop later on, the people who gave them seeds and fertilizers on credit will want those investments to be protected and so that is how we reach them,” she stated.

She added: “We might also, we work with Bank of Agriculture and with Bank of Agriculture we embed insurance into the credit that Bank of Agriculture gives to farmers and to the aggregators. So we are very much a partnership oriented organization to partner with farmers to do so.”

When asked about the scale of impact in Nigeria, Goslinga was candid about the challenge of size.

“So I would say in Nigeria we’ve probably, it’s still small because you’re a huge country. So even if you reach a million farmers, we’re still been talking about 2-3% of the population, right? It’s a huge country. So I would say we’ve reached about… I think our largest, the most successful year we probably had up to a million farmers or something like that,” she disclosed.

She noted that uptake fluctuates with partnerships and government support for agricultural credit, pointing to renewed momentum this year from institutions like the Bank of Agriculture.

On the company’s new focus on floodplain farming, she said floods, not drought, remain Nigeria’s biggest agricultural threat.

“So we definitely think that in Nigeria the biggest risk is not drought, it’s floods. Floods is the thing that really can wipe away, and quite suddenly also wipe away the benefits, or the work that farmers have done,” she said.

She argued that Nigeria has immense potential in rice, particularly in irrigated areas, but that potential is highly vulnerable.

“We think that there is a lot of potential for this because obviously Nigeria has one of the highest potential yields for rice I’ve seen. Up north in like Kebbi State, people getting 10 metric tons, you know, average in Nigeria is like basically three metric tons, but if you compare it to other African countries it can be as low as one to two, so you are very, very highly productive in the rice space, particularly in some of the irrigated areas. But those farmers at the same time also can really dramatically lose their crop due to floods,” she said.

She therefore called for a national response: “So we think that there is a lot of potential to put together a kind of a national flood insurance program together with organizations like NEMA and the government, because there is a strong role for government. Because as I said, farmers don’t wake up thinking that they want insurance, they think I want to plant, and so you do need that role of the government.”

On climate change awareness, Goslinga said while many farmers may not use the technical term, they feel the impact daily.

“They may not necessarily always have the words for climate change or… but they feel it, right? They feel it. They feel that the rains don’t always come on the 15th of May anymore, right? They are supposed to come in May but then they don’t. So I think they may not have always had the right words, but they certainly feel it and they feel it today,” she said.

She praised the resilience of farmers: “And so I certainly think that farmers also adapt today already because they are very intelligent and they can’t… they don’t have the room to decide that they… they don’t have the wiggle room. Their pockets don’t allow for them to have wiggle room. So they already have to adapt and make those changes.”

On expansion plans, Goslinga said Nigeria remains a priority, with less than 3% of farmers currently covered by insurance.

“So definitely there’s a lot of work in Nigeria in the area of insurance. There’s only, like I said, there’s only like 2 to 3% that we’re currently covering. And I would say that, so going deeper, making sure that there are more farmers (are covered),” she said.

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