On Thursday, last week, Our Chief Operations Officer, Sola Oyawale spoke at the Africa Agri-tech Development Forum championed by the Bobab organization themed: Financing the Future of Off-Farm Innovation. Sola was a participating discussant alongside our CEO, Akindele Philips. In attendance was also The Head of Partnerships, Aceli Africa, Christabell Makokha; The Group Chief Executive Officer, APA Insurance, Ashok Shah; Regional Director, Bolt Foods, Hillery Miller-Wise, and British Politician, Lord Paul Boateng who served as the moderator for the programme.
Sola at the virtual event
Sola was given the platform to speak in the second half of the programme tagged “The Roundtable”. He expressed that off-farm activities are one the best solutions to combating food insecurity, increasing farmers’ income, and their general welfare.
“I will say much less is known about the impact of off-farm activities on food security and nutrition. I see it as a core determinant that the average farmer or an agro-business entrepreneur can settle in and focus on the task”, he said.
Sola also taught that farmers should adopt means of understanding activities out of the farm by making references to how the pandemic propelled the idea of extra efforts in and out of the farm.
In his words, “the season before we had the pandemic was the dry season when we had a heatwave. The majority of farmers whose primary livelihood was tied to core production suffered a lot of setbacks in terms of yields accumulated. Then the pandemic followed by lockdowns imposed to deal with the spread of the virus. For ordinary citizens in the country, it was a big problem and a bigger one for the farmers who did not have an idea of how to make money from off-farm activities. That has added to the statistics of the looming food scarcity that has been projected. Off-farm activities also contribute to food production and farm income by easing capital constraints thus improving household welfare in many ways”.
The COO finally proffered that farming on a large scale will require cross-sector collaborative work which is needed when making a linkage of food production with natural resources, personnel, population, health, social equity and all other activities that constitute off-farming.
In the end, Sola was able to pull out views with regard to his discussion from other attendees of the programme. A contributor, Paul Halpin added that “My observation is that universities usually fail to provide the type of education to transform small farmers commercially viable units, teams or entities because they have restrictions as to what they can provide by way of programmes and usually what a small farmer needs coming from a small farm island, there is usually a need for a combination of a much technical input and knowledge and the commercial understanding of how to make money. Most times, a degree-based education does not provide such inputs so there is a significant gap”.
