The overall goal of the North East Youth Agripreneurship (NEYA) Initiative is to harness the energy and skills of Youths of the North East region of Nigeria into rewarding participation in agribusiness thereby contributing significantly to increased agricultural production, employment generation, and wealth creation in the region. The initiative is centred on facilitating the involvement of educated youths (with a minimum of secondary education) in agribusiness activities (primary production, service provision, value addition and commercialization) along rice, maize, cowpea and groundnut value chains.

The activities of these youths will in-turn create market opportunities for agricultural inputs (including fertilizers and improved seeds), farm services (including mechanization services for land preparation, planting, crop protection and harvesting), farm outputs (including aggregation and sale of grains) and value addition activities (particularly processing of grains into food products).

All these market opportunities are fully aligned with ISL’s primary business of end-to-end development of agricultural value chains to enable effective and profitable participation of smallholders. Specifically, as it will translate to

• Significant growth in demand for ISL’s supply of improved farm inputs and extension services,
• Expansion of ISL’s produce aggregation business through ready access to grains produced by the youths, and
• Expansion of ISL’s value addition activities into the region through partnership with NEYA associates.

Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.

― Malcolm X

The activities covered within the month under review includes the continuous strengthening of the NEYA groups in their meetings, facilitation of loan services, partnership that broadens the financial capacity of NEYA members and the agency banking facilitation for the NEYA members. All these activities are generally geared towards strengthening the resilience of the NEYA members as a fulfilment towards the commitment made by ISL.

ACTIVITY 7.1: Continuous engagement with Financial Institutions

As NEYA group members interest accentuate  in the dry season farming activities, ISL continue to engage with financial institutions to support in providing the youths with loan for dry season farming. Though efforts have been made to support NEYA groups through account opening, the CBN policy on Naira and queue in banks have sabotage efforts regarding accounts opening.

Hence, NEYA members have resolved to wait a little longer until the circumstances behind CBN policies and the queue in bank subsides. A visit to the bank have been scheduled for the coming week to still continue to explore opportunities on how this bottlenecks can be penetrated to foster the facilitation of these financial assistance to the NEYA groups.

ACTIVITY 7.1: Supporting NEYA group meetings

ISL field staff continues to support the established NEYA groups in their various meetings to ensure they maintain momentum towards achieving the fulfilment and aims of the group. As these meetings continue to hold, ISL field staffs continue to reiterate the benefits of operating a cooperative; nailing hard on the multifaceted benefits they stand to access as a body. Generally these youths continue to show enthusiasm even as some of them are already knee deep into the dry season farming.

Even though meetings have been put on hold by these groups because of the electioneering season in the country, we are optimistic that they will resume with vigour after the elections to continue with their regular meetings.

ACTIVITY 8.1: Dry Season Farming

Having received the Good Agronomy Practice (GAP) training and the Farming as a Business (FAB) training, the youths enrolled in the NEYA initiative continue to show their enthusiasm in exploring this knowledge practically by some of them engaging in the dry season farming. This spur is indicative of the fact that some of them want to have a first-hand tangible evidence of what it really means to practice farming as a business making use of good agricultural practices.

It is in the light of the above that the youth of certain selected communities beckoned on the attention of ISL to support them in the dry season farming they envisaged on. To further boost youth’s participation in the dry season farming activities, ISL supported some of these groups with water pumps to kick start the dry season activities. Groups supported during the period under review are;

• NEYA Peta 1
• NEYA Gombi1
• NEYA Kirbutu 2
• Old NEYA Gombe 1

As the dry season unfolds, ISL plans to support more groups with water pump in the coming weeks.

ACTIVITY 8.1: Developing Partnership with FCMB

Following an initial meeting between ISL and FCMB facilitated by the RRA, ISL continued the engagement towards developing a partnership that includes agency banking services (ISL will serve as a super-agent and recruit suitable NEYA members to serve as sub-agents) and integration of platforms to enable ISL perform a lot of broader financial service functions to its beneficiaries.

During the period under review, six (6) NEYA members to be engaged as sub-agents have been identified in each of the LGAs that are being covered under the NEYA initiative.

The plan is to onboard these members as sub-agents in the FCMB agency-banking network, with a view to using them to onboard NEYA members and others in their communities unto the bank as well as provides them loans for their farming operations in the raining season of the 2023.

The key lesson for the month under consideration is that follow-up is as important as starting an activity. Some of the groups were excited to see ISL field staff, negating their position of thinking that perhaps after the festivities they will be left alone unguided.

The next milestone that will define the achievements will be

• Follow up with SMFB managers and NEYA group members on the dry season loan application.
• Follow up with NEYA groups on weekly meetings, by FOs.
• Follow up on the construction of saving box.
• Preparations for ISL staff review and planning meeting.
• Completion of the already started Farming as a Business (FAB) training