Oyo govt.’s N1b SAfER project eludes women farmers, reveal field investigations

Smallholder women farmers in Oyo have yet to fully benefit from the state government’s Sustainable Action for Economic Recovery (SAfER) project which took off in February 2024, field investigations have revealed.

The project, now in its fourth phase, is a one billion naira initiative, targetted at providing financing and farming inputs to 10,000 smallholder farmers in the state.

Supreme News reports that in the first phase of SAfER, the state government had provided a ₦460 million loan to farmers to grow their businesses, while 24,000 bags of 50kg of maize were distributed to 2,000 poultry farmers and 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, in addition to the ₦550 million disbursed to various farmer-categories.

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

Despite these interventions, the State Chairperson of Smallholder Women Farmers Organisation of Nigeria (SWOFON), Atinuke Akinbade, highlighted three major problems now facing the project.

According to her, these include: impersonation, bottlenecks in accessing SAfER and other loans/grants as well as weak budget formulation and implementation in the agricultural sector that should support women smallholder farmers.

Akinbade noted that the main issue with the SAfER initiative was the government’s distribution mechanism which left room for impersonation, thus hindering many women farmers from having access to the intervention.

She said that only one woman farmer from her group was selected to benefit from the farming input distribution during the third phase.

“Even the farmer was subsequently disqualified due to what they called irregularities in the name she submitted,” she said.

Akinbade said that during the second phase, a pack of day-old chicks, two bags of starter feeds and two bags of fish feeds were distributed to three members of SWOFON.

To her, this level of support is not enough to significantly impact the livelihoods of the thousands of smallholder women farmers in the state.

Even more futile, according to Akinbade, are the efforts made by the women 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 the two women have been unable to submit the forms due to the clause demanding for a guarantor from the civil service,” Akinbade said.

As a security measure, the state government mandated loan applicants under the initiative to provide a guarantor from the civil service from Grade Level 07 and above.

However, investigation has shown that this requirement has only created barriers, thereby making the loan application inaccessible to the women farmers who are one of the primary targets of the initiative.

A smallholder woman farmer based in Oyo East Local Government Area, Mrs 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 from SWOFON were lucky to have the forms, but neither of us could get a guarantor. I think they were afraid of standing as guarantors and that was how I couldn’t submit the form till now,” Oyedeji said.

Another smallholder farmer based in Akinyele Local Government Area, Mrs Zainab Irekeola, said she had successfully filled out the loan application form but could not complete the process because nobody among those she knew in the civil service had attained the level to qualify as a guarantor.

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

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

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

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

Irekeola also suffered similar fate, as she complained of having 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 the farmlands that I got through the help of my husband, but I don’t have the money to do it now,” she said.

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

“If I had been able to access the loan, it would have helped my farming venture. What we do is contribute ‘ajo’ (pool funds), with contributors taking turns to get the money to plant crops.

“If the loan from the state government had come, we would have shared it so that more than one person would use it for farming, but only one person from SWOFON got the form and she couldn’t even submit it due to the guarantor issue,” Sulaimon said.

Another smallholder women farmer, Khadijat Toyosi from Iseyin council area, said if she and other women farmers had had access to the government loans, life would have been much easier, as they were still struggling to recover from the effects of COVID-19 pandemic.

She said that the pressure from the present economic situation in the country, exacerbated by the insecurity, had also made some women to stop farming.

“Two women cannot go to farm alone because of kidnapping that is rampant now. So one thing is to have access to money; the other is to be able to cultivate our lands with the money.

“Our sufferings are multi-faceted. It is not small sufferings that farmers are going through,” she said.

Toyosi, who shared how women farmers usually go to farms in groups to beat insecurity in the area, said many farmers who could not get government loans and had secured loans from microfinance banks were now afraid of losing their investments.

This, she said, was because of irregular rainfall at the beginning of the farming season and insecurity.

Despite the complaints of exclusion by the women farmers, the Commissioner for Agriculture, Olasunkanmi Olaleye, claimed that many smallholder women farmers had benefited from the SAfER loans.

The Desk Officer for women in agriculture, Mrs Abimbola Agbaje, did not, however, provide any data or figure to substantiate this claim while speaking with a NAN correspondent.

Agbaje said that the beneficiaries of the SAfER initiative were drawn from all the 33 local government areas in the state, including women and youths.

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

By Ibukun Emiola