They called on the federal, state and local governments to provide soft loans, improved seedlings, other agricultural inputs and extension services to the farmers to enable them to increase their food production.

The stakeholders include: the Chief Executive Officer, Centre for Community Empowerment and Poverty Eradication, Alhaji Abdulkareem Sulaiman; his Senior Programme Officer, Ayuba Akindele; a member, House Committee on Agriculture and Water Resources, Kwara State House of Assembly, Mrs. Segilola Abdulkadri, and Director, Agriculture and Engineering Service, Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Kwara State, Mr. Oyedele Abufarinde.

They spoke during a CCEPE’s policy summit between smallholder women farmers and relevant ministries, departments and agencies in Ilorin on Thursday.

Sulaiman stated that women farmers were very fundamental and relevant to food security in the country. He canvassed empowerment of the women to boost their agricultural activities, adding that the forum was to bring the right holders and the duty bearers together.

“The right holders are the government while the duty bearers are the farmers. We just brought them together so that the government and other stakeholders that are in charge of these women farmers, would know their problems and challenges and how they can assist them so that they can produce more than what they are doing now,” he said.

Akindele urged the government to create an enabling environment and give the women farmers priority in strategies to boost food security and access to industrial raw materials.

He called for gender-sensitive budgeting that will take care of the concerns and challenges of women farmers.

Abdulkadri urged all tiers of government to include the women farmers in their budgets so as to encourage them and harness their potential and productivity to boost food security and employment creation.

She said, “The women farmers produce so many foodstuffs. They not only produce little products as pepper and tomatoes, they also produce cassava, soya beans and others.”

Abufarinde, who stated that the state government had disbursed N250m loan to 172 farmers and that the government had exhausted its loan for this year, said the state government had promised to increase the loan next year if the current beneficiaries repaid.

Abufarinde said, “If the women farmers are in cooperatives, the banks will listen to them. Also the state is implementing ‘off-taker-driven’ agriculture which allows the producer who are the farmers to be able to determine and know what to produce even before they start.

“From there, if they articulate it well, they would have known the person to buy their product, who is the ‘off-taker’ and the price to sell to be able to determine their gains.”