A few weeks ago, my colleague, Ifeoluwa Olatunji, and Olaoluwa Bamigboye and I represented the Farmcrowdy aggregation team on our visit to Ijebu Ode to carry out enumeration of farmers. Our journey began at around 3PM when we left for the Ojota interstate bus park. We arrived at the bus stop around 4:48PM and spent another 20 minutes at the park loading up before we eventually took off.
The journey from Ojota bus park to Ijebu Ode Lagos park was uneventful except for the multiple checkpoints by the Nigerian police. We arrived at Ijebu Ode at 6:58PM and I received a text from another colleague from the aggregation team, Olaoluwa, who had travelled a different route, to proceed to Eruwon for hotel hunting. The journey to Eruwon was a 30 minute motorbike ride which quite frankly, felt like an eternity.
Hotel hunting began, we eventually settled down for one close to the Eruwon Police station. That sorted, it was already past 8pm and time for dinner but this hotel said their only menu was Indomie and Egg. Thanks to our host who was gracious enough to drive us back to town to eat Mama put Amala and Ewedu with assorted meat. We (myself, Olalouwa and Ifeoluwa) settled down at our hotel and got ready for the early morning ahead of us.
The next morning, at around 7:30AM, we set out to the Orunwa community. It was an hour’s road trip from Eruwon. On arrival we headed straight to the community chief’s house; he had a friendly dog and a town crier with the metal gong and stick to boot. I had only seen that in movies so it was interesting to see firsthand how information gets disseminated in the rural area. The town crier went around the community to announce our presence and asked the farmers to assemble at the designated data capturing venue.
The data capturing started with introductions and a short speech from the Farmcrowdy team, a section for Question and Answer before proceeding to the farmers data capturing to the Farmcrowdy app.
It was an interesting time engaging the Cassava farmers; I always took it for granted that everyone has access to mobile phones so it was a bit surprising that the majority of them in their 40s had no mobile phones and bank accounts despite being just 1 hour away from the city.
We met over 100 farmers and we were told we could have met more of them but most had gone to the bi weekly market to sell off their harvest. After the data capturing that lasted for 3 hours, we took a walk round the community to say thank you and goodbye to the community Chiefs before leaving.
The road trip back to Lagos was interesting and we had fun buying farm fresh corn as souvenirs.
