This year, the International Day of Rural Women (15 October), puts a spotlight on “Rural Women Cultivating Good Food for All.” Recall that the UN General Assembly in its resolution 62/136 of 18 December 2007 affirms this international day to recognize “the critical role and contribution of rural women, including indigenous women, in enhancing agricultural and rural development, improving food security and eradicating rural poverty.”
CD 4 Project recognizes that Rural women and girls play essential roles in food systems – from Production, to Processing, Preservation, Packaging and Promotion (the 5Ps of Agricultural Value-Chain), as well as in securing household and community nutrition. Yet, unequal power relations between women and men in the household and society, discriminatory gender norms, practices access to finance and market, insecurity / prevalent violence against women and girls, disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work, resulting in unequal access to food, hunger, malnutrition, under-nutrition, and food insecurity.
The C4D Project– an initiative of SEEED Multipurpose Cooperative Society Ltd, offers her One Local Government One Agriculture Product (OLOAP) plan to Mobilize, Raise Awareness, Sensitize, Encourage and Reward / Recognize Rural Women who have displayed resilience to “Cultivate Good Food For All”. The Unveiling of the Livelihood Support Programme for Rural Women in Nigeria is symbolic avails us to task our Financial & Non-Financial institutions on innovative financing for the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs to attain its mandate as well as increase the demography for rural women & girls in fulfillment of Mr. President’s Agenda to lift 100millions Nigerians out of poverty by Year 2030.
I am pleased to inform you that capacity building programme is currently ongoing for 600 rural women in the FCT (that is100 per Area Council) focusing on Agro-Processing and Packaging, Business Development, Cooperative Financing, Export and Assess to Market through Girls Digital Literacy, Sales & Marketing (Agro-Social Mediapreneurs) of agro-products of our rural women, upon review, we shall step-down our activities to other States of the Federation.
