Give women adequate agriculture allocations and gender friendly farm equipment- SWOFON ( Photos)

The Small Scale Women Farmers Organization in Nigeria (SWOFON) has demanded the 35percent agricultural allocation for women farmers to bridge the gap of inequality in the agriculture and boost productivity among the women farmers in Nigeria.

The National President, SWOFON, Mary Afan Ishaya said this while submitting their demand to Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in Abuja as part of the activities to carry out national campaign on collective advocates for improved seeds and seedling, fertilizer, gender friendly equipment, gender equity in agriculture among others.

 Ishaya said the demand and application is born out of the need to bridge the gender gap in agriculture and boost productivity among the women farmers who despites accounting for 72 percent of agricultural Labour force in Nigeria are disadvantaged.

Speaking further on some of the problems faced by members of SWOFON, said said, dependency on human power has over the years contributed significantly to low agricultural productivity and is responsible for the huge poverty rate, low life expectancy and failing health experienced among women smallholder farmers due to the use of crude implements and manual farming.

She however, expressed optimism that their collective demand would be met as it will directly improve the farm yields and outputs of small-scale women farmers and making them more productive and leading to an increase in their income.

The Director of Federal Department of Agriculture, Karima Babangida in her remarks appreciates the effort of SWOFON to carry out the campaign on behalf of the small holders women farmers in the country in the right direction by working closely with ministry.

Babangida assured SWOFON that the ministry is gender friendly  and that they would benefits from various strategic agro policy programmes from the ministry such as seeds, equipments and machineries of government at subsidise rates whenever they are procured by the ministry.