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Over 18000 women and youths working in the agriculture and fabrication sector in Bauchi State have been supported by the Canadian Government funded Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) which is an international economic development organization that creates business solutions to poverty.
Country Project Manager of MEDA, Fosen Grace made the disclosure in Bauchi during a one-day strategic partnership meeting with all partners that had and is supporting the Nigeria WAY project to achieve gains within the state including the project’s stakeholders.
According to her, “The entire project portfolio, the donor funding for the project, is 16m US Dollars for Bauchi State alone for the duration of the project, but because of COVID-19, we had a 2-year no-cost extension because the project was supposed to end in 2022.”
“COVID-19 slowed a lot of things, we are very hopeful that within the period we have, we will be able to expend all that money in Bauchi state for Bauchi women and youths. For all the targets, we have reached, 70 per cent are women while 30 per cent are youths, mostly male youths”, She also said.
The country project manager explained that “We are here in Bauchi state to support women and youths in the agric value chain, people who are already entrepreneurs, that are working, we build their capacities in terms of knowing how to manage their businesses, that is business development training services that we provide and we link them to have access to financing.”
Fosen Grace added that the project is tagged Nigeria WAY stressing that, “we equip them with technology that will help them in improving their skills and be able to improve on the way they process, we bring climate resilience systems in managing their work, whether in the production or in the processing but we are more focused on the processing”.
She added that “and so we support these women and youths with their business skills and also we support them even in their families because we realized that some of them are kind of handicapped, they don’t have family support, when we saw that, we now brought in the gender action learning system that supports women, that enhance family to support women and allow them to do their business and give them agents.”
“So we do all that, and for the youths, we have supported them to have technology, fabricators especially to have the technology to be able to fabricate technology that is used to process and they have opportunities to have feedbacks on how these technologies are performing and to improve on that.”
She added that “so we give them marching grants, we give them innovation funding, our intervention is like 70 and 30 per cent, they bring in 30 per cent and we give 70 per cent, we don’t give handouts, we don’t give free things, we want people who are active in business and we then support them.”
According to her, “We have supported over 18000 though our target was 16000 we have surpassed our target because everywhere we go, we have quite a number of people saying that we have not reached them and they want to be part of the intervention, so the demand is high but the resources is limited, what we have to do is what we are doing currently”.
Fosen Grace then commended Bauchi State Government saying that “it has been very supportive though there is no design for counterpart funding in terms of Naira and kobo it is in the buy-in of the project, for them to support what we are doing, to encourage us and which they have done so immensely.’
” if they had not opened their arms and supported us in the manner they had done I don’t think we would ever make this progress that has within the period that we did. Bauchi State Government has been very receptive, we cannot thank them enough. We sincerely appreciate the Governor, and the various MDAs we have been working with”, She concluded.
Earlier in his remarks, Bauchi State Commissioner of Budget and Economic Planning, Aminu Hamayyo commended MEDA for bringing the project to Bauchi state saying that it has really contributed to the development of the agric chain project of the state.
Represented the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry, Idris Saleh Giade, the Commissioner reiterated the commitment of the government to encouraging development partners in their efforts to help develop the state in every sector.
He further commended Global Affairs Canada (GAC) for showing commitment to the project implementation in Bauchi state saying, “It has really done well for us, we appreciate. The meeting is to review what MEDA is doing in order to give feedback on how to sustain the project beyond 2024”.
Aminu Hamayyo said that “We have taken up the responsibility on how to keep the project going by replicating the success recorded in the 7 LGAs it is operating to the other LGAs across the state for development.”
The 7-Year Youth Entrepreneurship and Women’s Empowerment in Northern Nigeria Project – Nigeria WAY has been implemented by MEDA, currently in its 6th implementation year and is working towards consolidating its efforts within Bauchi State and building sustainable structures that will ensure the gains from the project are entrenched within the state beyond the seven local governments the project activities are being implemented.
The Nigeria WAY project is operational in seven LGAs of Ganjuwa, Warji, Toro, Bauchi, Dass, Jama’are and Katagum.
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