Poverty mitigation: Project juriya equips farmers with leadership, financial skills in Adamawa
In its move to substantially mitigate poverty especially amongst small holder farmers, Project Juriya has trained no fewer than 100 Mutual Trust Groups, (MTGs) on leadership and financial independence in Adamawa State.
During the training, the MTGs were given certificates of business registration that will enable them to access credit facilities from financial institutions across the country in other to boost their operations.
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Project Juriya which came into being in 2022 in Adamawa State was a brainchild of a mutual partnership between SCL food systems and MasterCard foundation and is currently being implemented in 10 local governments of the state.
Speaking on the rationale of the training, Joran Nganga, agric finance expert, project Juriya noted that the leadership and financial training will incentivised the MTGs to become financial independence in the shortest foreseeable future.
“Project juriya is about regenerative agriculture what we popularly call carbon farming, instead of using chemicals our people can start eating healthy but beyond that, we are looking at improving their financial status using agriculture. It is all about doing business with our farms. It’s about small farm holders using their farms to do business.
“That is why we formed Mutual Trust Groups, which are marketing groups and train them on financial management and leadership so that in time they will be able to stand on their own. They will be able to save money and invest to improve their lives and livelihoods,” he said.
Also speaking, Hidia Kefas, the SCL project coordinator in Adamawa noted that the objective of the training is to teach the farmers to know the benefits of financial inclusion in order to float above poverty.
“One needs a skill on how to save, how to increase his income earning level so that he can have more savings and can have other things which he can couple together with farming in order to remain above poverty.
“The overall objectives of SCL juriya is to break the circle of poverty and we are not concerned with the well to do farmers. We are concerned with small holder farmers that cannot afford synthetic inputs like fertilizer and chemicals especially looking at the high cost of inputs these days.
“There are practices and principles attached to it. These principles and practices will guide these farmers how to use local inputs like animal dung even in smaller quantities mixing them with farm residues to get compost out of it.
“With these, the farmers can farm without using synthetic chemicals. The vision of SCL juriya is all about the future especially considering climate change. In order to mitigate the effect of the climate change, we go into regenerative agriculture, agro forestry or carbon farming. These are practices that can mitigate climate change across the world that is the main objective why SCL is implementing the project across the ten LGs.
“For now we have 100 registered MTGs in Adamawa State across the 10 LGs. The benefit of registering them is that we want the state government, the federal government and financial institutions to know that these small holder farmers have been registered and can access small loans from these institutions as a group so they can improve their status,” he said.
Thanking SCL juriya project, some of the beneficiaries of the project including Rebecca Stevens and Obioma Oha noted that the program has really changed their financial status significantly.
“We have learnt a lot. The project has impacted on our lives financially through the regenerative agriculture, it has also boost our financial status. Through the training we have learnt that farming is a main economic stay. We have learnt that you don’t have to use fertilizers and other chemicals to succeed in agriculture,” they noted.
