By Ibukun EMIOLA

THE Oyo State government introduced the Sustainable Action for Economic Recovery (SAfER) project in February 2024. Despite being a N1 billion initiative targeted at providing financing and farming inputs to 10,000 smallholder farmers in the state, investigation shows that women farmers in the state are yet to fully benefit from this initiative, which is now in its fourth phase.

The first phase of the SAfER initiative, the Oyo government provided a ₦460 million loan to farmers to grow their businesses. It also distributed 24,000 bags of 50 kg of maize to 2,000 poultry farmers, as well as fish feeds to 1,000 farmers.

The second phase saw the distribution of 3,000 bags of 15kg of fish feed to 1,000 farmers, along with ₦550 million disbursed to various farmer categories.

The third phase, which commenced in April 2024, was purportedly focused on distributing agricultural inputs to farmers, including supporting 1,000 pig farmers across the state with two bags of 50 kg of feed and two bottles of disinfectants each.

Bottlenecks

Despite these interventions, the Oyo State chairperson of the SAfER, Atinuke Akinbade, highlighted three major problems encountered, particularly faced by her members.

These are; impersonation, bottlenecks in accessing SAfER and other loans/grants, and weak budget formulation and implementation in the agricultural sector that should support small holder women farmers.

According to Akinbade, the main issue with the SAfER initiative is the government’s distribution mechanism, which leaves room for impersonation and has restricted many women farmers’ access to the intervention.

She disclosed that only one farmer from their group was selected to benefit from the farming input distribution during the third phase, saying, “Even this particular farmer was subsequently disqualified due to irregularities in the name she submitted.

During the second phase, Akinbade said, a pack of day-old chicks, two bags of starter feeds, and two bags of fish feeds were distributed to three members of Small-scale Women Farmers Organization in Nigeria (SWOFON).

However, she emphasised that this level of support is not enough to significantly impact the livelihoods of the thousands of small holder women farmers in the state.

According to her, even more futile are the efforts made by the farmers to access loans under the initiative due to the stringent requirements associated with the application process.

“Only two out of our women farmers got the form to apply for loans under the SAfER initiative, and they have been unable to submit the forms due to the clause demanding a guarantor from the civil service,” Akinbade said.

As a security measure, the state government mandated that loan applicants under the initiative must provide a guarantor from the civil service from grade level 07 or above.

However, this requirement has only created barriers, making the loan application effectively inaccessible to the women farmers who need it the most.

Women farmers lament

A small holder farmer based in Oyo East Local Government Area, (LGA), Oluwatoyin Oyedeji, said she was lucky to get the application form, but her joy was short lived when she could not get a willing guarantor to support her application.

“Only two of us were lucky to have the forms, but neither of us could get a guarantor. I think they (potential guarantors) were afraid of standing in for us; that was how I couldn’t submit the form till now,” Oyedeji said.

Another small holder farmer based in Akinyele LGA, Zainab Irekeola, said she successfully filled the loan application form but could not complete the process because nobody in the state civil service had attained the level to qualify as a guarantor.

In an attempt to address this bottleneck, the state government in April 2024 reviewed the clause, allowing the chairperson or any executive of a registered small holder farmers group to stand as guarantor for its members.

However, this move was rather late, according to the women farmers, as they could no longer access the application forms.

For Oyedeji, being unable to access the loan halted her plan to cultivate more than one hectare during the planting season.

“I was planning to cultivate about seven hectares of land if I got the SAfER loan, but now I can only do one hectare,” Oyedeji said.

Another farmer, simply identified as Irekeola, suffered a similar fate, stating that she had meagre funds to sustain her farm. “This is a huge setback for me. I had planned to buy farm inputs with the loan to cultivate on the farmlands that I got through the help of my husband, but I don’t have the money to do it now,” she said.

With one of her children currently on the mandatory National Youth Corps Service (NYSC)  in Aware State, she expressed worry that she would not be able to support him now that he is far away from home.

Similarly, a woman farmer in Oyo town, Fatimo Sulaimon, who didn’t get the loan, lamented how getting the loan would have been because she was unable to cultivate her five hectares farmland due to a poor return on investment made in the last farming season.

“If I was able to access the loans, it would have helped my farming venture. What we do is local contribution in which each person takes turns getting the money to plant crops.

“If the loan from the Oyo State government had come, we would have shared it so that more than one person would use it for farming. Sadly, only one person from Oyo town in got the form, and the person couldn’t submit it due to the guarantor issue,” Sulaimon said.

Sulaimon, who is pregnant with her third child, expressed how difficult it would be to survive and fend for herself and her children, given that her husband is a peasant farmer like herself.

For Khadijat Toyosi, from Iseyin LGA, said if she and other fellow farmers had access to the loans from the government, life would have been much easier as they were still struggling to recover from the effects of COVID-19 and the pressures from the present economic situation, which had made some women stop farming, due to the insecurity on farmlands.

“Two women cannot go to farm alone because of the kidnapping that is rampant now. If we have loans, we won’t be able to farm. So, one thing is to have access to money; the other is to be able to cultivate our land with the money. So, it is not small suffering that farmers are going through,” Toyosi said.

Toyosi, who narrated how women farmers go to farms in groups owing to the insecurity bedeviling the area, said many farmers who could not get government loans and had succeeded in doing so from microfinance banks but are now afraid of losing their investments because of irregular rainfall at the beginning of the farming season as well as insecurity.

They have benefitted – Oyo government insists

Despite their cries, the Oyo State commissioner for agriculture, Olasunkanmi Olaleye, claimed that many small holder women farmers have benefited from the SAfER loans.

However, the commissioner’s office did not provide any data or figures to substantiate this claim when speaking to this reporter through the desk officer for women in agriculture, Abimbola Agbaje.

On how beneficiaries of the SAfER initiative were drawn, Agbaje said they were drawn from the 33 LGAs, including youths.

Agbaje said, “My unit is ensuring we register women farmers into groups and cooperatives because the government wants to interact with groups instead of individuals.”

According to her, only four out of the 33 LGAs in the state have small holder women farmers who have benefited from other loans and initiatives, and this came as a result of collaboration with partners such as the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN).

Agbaje said there was yet to be data on the number of women who benefited from SAfER initiative as the implementation was ongoing, adding, “It would be difficult to give data because SAfER initiative is for everyone, male and female, who are into small scale businesses.”

Agbaje also stated that the government’s policy allocates 50 to 60 percent of the farming supplies to women and youths.

When informed that SWOFON members reported not having access to support, especially loans and farming inputs, Agbaje said, “We have officers on the field that disseminate information about our support programmes to these women so they can apply. But the problem is that it is easier for women who are in clusters to access the money than individuals.”

Agbaje further explained that each of the 33 LGAs in the state is covered by one state-appointed extension officer, a ratio that most experts would describe as abysmal given the large geographic size and high farming population across the different council areas.

To increase their chances of accessing necessary support in the future, Akinbade stated that SWOFON is now stepping up efforts to develop a database of its members and ensure the state government has access to it.

Meanwhile, the SWOFON chairperson in Oyo State Atinuke Akinbade confirmed that their members only received support from the  Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency (SMEDAN), created by government to support small and medium scale enterprises.

She added that oftentimes this does not go round every women farmer in the association but they had to make do with what is available.

She stated that ten people were trained by SMEDAN on procurement, packaging, managing business ventures, book keeping, and record keeping to ensure profitability and self-reliance.

On efforts to access other loans and grants from the Bank of Industry (BOI), African Development Bank (AfDB), and Bank of Agriculture (BOA), Akinbade said the attempt to get credit facilities from the BOA was unsuccessful because it had yet to register with the Oyo State Trade and Investment to obtain a certificate of incorporation, a major criterion for processing the loans.

The lack of the required certificate has been another stumbling block inhibiting the association from getting interventions from the government, even as the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) report showed that only seven percent of women have access to loans from banks.

Investigation has shown that there are limitations in accessing loans and grants such as collateral and certificates of incorporation, among others. Out of the seven per cent, there is no data to show the number of small holder women farmers who have access to loans from banks either directly or through government agencies’ programmes or initiatives.

Akinbade said the association has been working on registering with the Oyo State Trade and Investment Commission to have a certificate that it could use to get grants and loans from BOA and others.

Other FG loans Interventions for SMEs

Oladipo Falana, the Ibadan coordinator of the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL Plc.), a non-bank financial institution wholly owned by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), said he could not say if there is any intervention for women farmers.

“For now, there is no programme for small holder women farmers, but we are working on one. I can’t speak authoritatively on it but when it is out it will be in the news,” he said.

Another federal government agency, SMEDAN, in Oyo State through its coordinator, Mrs Iyabo Ojogbede, said about 55 to 60 per cent of their interventions are targeted at small holder women farmers.

“At SMEDAN, we have some special programmes for women in small businesses. They include women in self-empowerment, the conditional grant scheme, and agri-business development empowerment.

“Others are entrepreneurship development training and cluster intervention programme for women in agriculture business in cooperative groups,” Ojogbede said.

The Oyo State chairperson of SWOFON said there is a limiting factor that has been identified and being worked on so that women can fully access loans from the government.

Some beneficiaries speak

Two SWOfON members who had benefited from interventions from the government, Nike Fajinmi and Bolatumi Oyelakin, said it had minimally impacted their livelihoods.

“I received a dryer for Garri processing, but we need funds from the government, though we have been assured that we will get loans when we follow the right process.

“The process is that we should form a cooperative so that the government can give us loans,” Fajinmi, a middle-aged small holder woman farmer at Ona-Ara LGA, said.

She said she and her husband, a cocoa farmer, have been into farming and it was the proceeds from their venture that they have been living on and using to send their children to school up to tertiary level.

According to her, loan intervention from the government would enhance farming as the cost of cultivating farmland has increased significantly.

On her part, Oyelakin, who said she benefited from phase two of the SAfER initiative, said, “Two members of SWOFON got a pack of day-old chicks and we divided it into half.  A pack has 42 chicks of the day old and we divided it, so each of us took 21 chicks home.

“When I returned to my LGA, I took 10 out of the chicks because I was the one that went to get it using my money for transportation, and I shared the rest with four other members as well as the leader of SWOFON in Ona-Ara LGA.

“The chicks were viable, and they contributed to our livelihoods, though the quantity was small, by the time the bottleneck to accessing SAfER loans was removed, it was too late for many of us who wanted to get it to improve farming businesses and enhance our livelihoods,” she said.

Oyelakin said her husband was into farming and that they have raised their children with the proceeds from agriculture.

Investigation also reveals that there is a need for a review of how the budget is being formulated and implemented so that clear cut benefits can be earmarked for women farmers, and small holder women farmers in particular, who have contributed significantly to food production in Nigeria.

For instance, the 2022 approved budget for the state under the ministry of agriculture, Oyo State Agri-Business Development Agency, and Agric Credit Corporation didn’t spell out what percentage goes to men, women, youth, and the other vulnerable groups who are small scale farmers.

Also, there are overlapping programmes and initiatives from these agencies that could be of great service to the good of every citizen if they were harmonised.

A budget analyst, Anthony Oyedeji, said under normal circumstances there should be consultation before any formal document of budget estimate is prepared.

Oyedeji, who is from the governance and policy unit of the Justice Development, and Peace Commission, (JDPC) stated that people from different zones and local governments, under budget consultation, present their needs according to their priorities.

“That is one of the best ways to gather projects and needs assessments from people, including those in the agricultural sector.

“But the most important thing is to look into databases to know the records of genuine farmers in the state or in the country as a whole – in terms of sex, people with disabilities, and so on.”

Also, a financial consultant, Tunji Adepeju, said that regarding budget preparation and management, it has always been at the administrative end that what goes to who or which gender is factored.

A study of the budget estimate of Oyo State from 2022 to 2024 showed that its budget consultative meeting done yearly under the present government had little or no impact on the actual budget in terms of having a breakdown of how much goes into each category of beneficiaries of whatever programmes or initiatives it has for small holder women farmers.

While stakeholders differ in opinion on the above, some believe that the actual distribution of who gets what is at the administrative level during implementation, while others think otherwise.

This report was made possible with support from the International Centre for Investigative Reporting, ICIR.