‘You can make noodles from cassava’
What is the significance of this training?
For us at PATS Farms, which is an organisation in partnership with IITA on this, we represent social entrepreneurship. We consider it as community service. We think that there are so many opportunities in Nigeria which are also solutions to some challenges in the country, and which Nigerians don’t know about it. It was targeted at what the African Youth Charter describes as youth population, which is the population between 15 and 35 years. In Nigeria that represents over 70% of the population.
This age bracket is also the most productive population. So what we did was to write to the area councils in Abuja, asking them to nominate 5 people from the area councils and we had a total of 30 persons. We now got IITA to come and train these people in the alternative uses of cassava outside garri, eba or akpu.
How many recipes of cassavabased snacks can you boast of?
The IITA Ibadan has developed over 30 amazing recipes for cassava-based snacks. It’s amazing what they are doing in this area but nobody knows.
What do you hope to achieve with this training?
We hope to achieve two things: it will provide jobs, or employment for many youth and women in the country. Nigeria is the largest producer of cassava in the world, which means we can employ people. Again, even though we don’t have direct policy targeting women, we know that they are the ones who fry kose (bean cake) and stuffs like that. Everyone that I know who went to school in those days will remember the woman at the gate who fries Kose, whose son was in class with you; whose daughter graduated from school with you through the money made from that Kose.
Now what happens to that? We are saying you can do more than that. There are bakers out there who can be trained to do many things. Guess what? You can make noodles from cassava. The recipe is there.
Is this training specifically targeted at small-scale women bakers?
No. Like I said, we are not surprise with the number of women who turned up for this training. It is these women you see with meat pies, cakes and so on.
Do you think this is a pragmatic approach to youth unemployment?
Yes. We at PATS Farms feel that there is so much out there. In Nigeria today we are losing it. I am saying this with utmost responsibility. We see Nigeria as an accident waiting to happen in the sense that there are so many young people out there without jobs. That is why we have all sorts of uprisings. If people are gainfully engaged, there would be no room for anybody to go into alternatives that are not viable.
Are you going beyond just training?
Oh yes. These are pilot trainings; a lot of data is being gathered and would be evaluated and the lessons learnt, and then we will fine-tune it. In two years, we want to go round Nigeria and apply the same strategy or similar strategy depending on what we find to be optimum base on this experience to implement across all the local governments in the country.
It is pertinent to note that a lot of youth and women groups have shown so much interest on the programme. We don’t even have enough resources and facilities to handle all their requests.
Beyond here, we are taking down their data, and the objective is: there will be monitoring and evaluation outside the training. Therefore, we have made the minimum requirement for any person attending to be someone who has secondary school qualification so as to be able to train others.
Are you looking at the possibility of assisting these trainees with equipment or finance?
My answer to that question is: it is desirable. We have invited banks, we have invited the ministry of agriculture, SMEDAN and people who have similar programmes to key into what we are doing and support us.
To be clear, we are not an NGO, we are a corporate organisation in the business of agriculture and this is an area of agriculture that we feel we can make little contribution towards. This is our mission. So if there is any organisation who wants to partner with us in empowering many Nigerians, we will be very happy.