Small-scale Women Farmers Organization in Nigeria, SWOFON, said agricultural extension services are not adequate.
The women farmers stated that the services provided by government extension agents are not enough to support their farming activities to boost food production and in the FCT.
While reading the scorecard on behalf of the Women farmers, the Project Lead of SWOFON, Chika Orji said 16.7percent of mostly the groups from Abaji and Kwali area council representatives indicated that they don’t know because they did not access any extension services from government extension agents.
The scorecard further shows that from 83.3percent respondents that have accessed government agricultural extension services in the last four years (2020-2023), 27.8percent indicated that their various cooperatives find the services “useful” such as training, farm inputs, market access, land preparation while 55.5percent indicated fairly used.
According to the scorecard, 66.7percent of the respondents scored the extension services provided by the government “somewhat timely” while 33.3percent including those that did not access the services indicated that they don’t know because the only extension service some of them accessed was the training on tomato processing and preservation which is not time bound .
The report recommended employment of more extension workers, increase budget allocation for extension services to women in the FCT.
