More Nigerian farmers benefit from World Bank agriculture Project

The World Bank assisted Commercial Agriculture Development Project (CADP) is to be expanded to five other states in Nigeria to cover the six geopolitical zones and further increase the number of beneficiaries. This will bring the number of participating states to 10.

At the Mid-Term Review Mission of the project which ended in Lagos recently, it was agreed that the project be restructured to enhance speedy implementation as well as prompt disbursement to project beneficiaries.

The mission team visited four participating states and met with stakeholders, beneficiaries and top government officials. The states are Enugu, Cross River, Kano, and Lagos.

The Task Team Leader of the project, Dr. Lucas Akapa informed the states that CADP would ensure alignment with Federal and State Governments Agricultural policies, especially the new Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA).

Dr. Lucas Akapa also stated that the project will make adequate arrangement towards ensuring the sustainability of the project after its closure in December, 2014.

In his words, “The issue of sustainability is very important as most of projects' interventions died after the closure of the projects".

In his remarks, the National Project Coordinator of CADP, Dr. Amin Babandi said that the Mid-Term Review Mission was meant to reflect and take a comprehensive review of the general performance of all the components of the project and study the lessons learnt with the view to correcting them.

"At half way, we need to reflect and get those aspects that are correct and enhance them, look at those that are not working and correct them," Babandi said.

Dr.Babandi lamented the low implementation performance, and urged project staff to quickly make significant progress to enable commercial farmers to benefit from the laudable objectives of the project.

The Mid-Term Review is conducted at the middle of a project life to review performance and identify challenges impeding the smooth implementation of the project in the last two and a half years as well as work out solutions that would expedite implementation and attainment of the project development objectives.

CADP project and benefit

Commercial Agriculture Development Project is being implemented in Kano, Kaduna, Lagos, Cross River and Enugu and will support three value chains per state as follows: Cross River - oil palm, cocoa and rice, Enugu - fruit trees, poultry and maize; Kaduna - fruit trees, dairy and maize; Kano, rice, dairy and maize and Lagos - poultry, aquaculture and rice. With the restructuring and expansion of the project to other states, more value chains are expected to be added.

The project will have direct impact on 50,000 small and medium commercial farmers while many households will benefit indirectly through access to farm roads, energy and market through spillover effects.

The US$150 million project which commenced on July 30, 2009 is expected to close on December 31, 2014.

Cokey