Amnesty Beneficiaries to Use 23 NAFDAC Technology Incubation Centres for Food Production
Ndubuisi Francis
Beneficiaries of the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) are set to use 23 technology incubation centres of the National Agency for Food and Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC) to boost food production.
This is coming as PAP also partnered the National Board for Technology Incubation (NBTI) to improve the quality and certification of agricultural and other products of its beneficiaries trained and empowered in the agriculture and allied sector.
To this end, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Office of the Special Adviser to the President on Niger Delta and Coordinator, Amnesty Programme and the NBTI will be signed tomorrow in Abuja.
A statement issued by Murphy Ganagana, Special Assistant (Media) to the PAP Coordinator, Prof. Charles Dokubo, said this followed an approval granted the programme by the Director General of NAFDAC, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, to use 23 technology incubation centres allocated to it by the NBTI for cluster manufacturing by beneficiaries of the Amnesty Programme.
The centres will be used by beneficiaries of the programme trained and empowered in the agriculture sector to produce their products for the purpose of obtaining NAFDAC registration numbers with a view to enhancing quality and acceptability of products in the market.
Beneficiaries, who are trained on production of rice, Garri, plantain flour, plantain chips, ‘chin-chin’, smoked fish, chicken, snail, fruit juice cosmetics, among others, will benefit from the partnership.
The 23 NBTI technology incubation centres approved for the programme to be used by the beneficiaries are located in Edo, Abia, Imo, Ondo, Rivers, Cross Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa and Delta States.
Apart from the MoU with the NBTI, the Amnesty Programme Small Business Support Desk, an initiative of the Coordinator of the Programme, Dokubo, is to ensure that all graduates of the programme vocational training centres trained on production of NAFDAC regulated products are registered for safety, efficacy, distribution and sale of their products.