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The BAT Foundation has reiterated its committedness to empowering smallholder farmers and strengthening Nigeria’s cultivation ecosystem.
Through its 2025 Agribusiness Dialogue Session, the instauration advocates for innovative financing models, argumentation frameworks, and marketplace entree strategies to unlock the imaginable of smallholder farmers.
The Dialogue Session, held biennially since 2015, has go 1 of Nigeria’s astir influential platforms for shaping policy, sparking innovation, and mobilising stakeholders successful the agrifood system. This year’s variation successful Lagos focused connected the theme: “Is the Smallholder Farmer Really Finance-able?”
Smallholder farmers, representing implicit 40 cardinal radical and producing astir 80 per cent of Nigeria’s food, are the backbone of the country’s nutrient information and agrarian economy. Yet they look mounting challenges arsenic planetary assistance and donor-driven interventions decline.
The enforcement manager of BATNF, Mrs Halimat Shuaibu, stated, “Our task is to guarantee that smallholder farmers are not lone financeable but besides resilient, thriving, and recognised arsenic captious to Nigeria’s maturation story. Agriculture indispensable determination from being seen arsenic a survivalist task to a strategical operator of nationalist wealth.”
The wide manager of BATN Foundation, Oludare Odusanya, emphasised that the existent trial of fiscal quality lies successful moving from mentation to practice, saying that smallholder farmers indispensable beryllium seen not arsenic passive recipients of assistance but arsenic progressive partners successful Nigeria’s economical transformation.
“For excessively long, conversations astir smallholder farmers person centred connected limitations alternatively than possibilities. At BATNF, we spot concern arsenic conscionable 1 portion of the puzzle. True empowerment happens erstwhile financing is coupled with knowledge, innovation, and marketplace access. We purpose to adjacent these gaps truthful that smallholder farmers are nary longer defined by dependency, but recognised arsenic the existent engines of Nigeria’s agribusiness economy,” helium said.
Delivering the keynote address, the elder peculiar advisor connected Agricultural Innovation to the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Prof. Ademola Adenle, debunked the conception that smallholder farmers simply question grants.
He emphasised the request for innovative financing solutions underpinned by credible husbandman information and transparent systems.
“Every kobo invested successful smallholder farmers is not charity. It is 1 of the smartest investments we tin marque contiguous due to the fact that agriculture remains the surest operator of jobs, innovation, and resilience,” helium said.
In enactment with its long-standing absorption connected younker successful agriculture, BATNF utilized the Dialogue to showcase winners of the 2025 Farmers for the Future (F4F) competition. First-place victor Mr Daniel Jacob of Aretecom Limited received N3 cardinal successful backing support. Ms Emmanuel Mary of Zibah Foods and Mr Akinloye John of Geentead Farm NG each received N2 cardinal arsenic second-place winners. In contrast, Mr Ikhahon Robinson (Heabron Farm Ltd), Ms Adetuberu Sikeade (Lycos Nutrients Enterprises), and Mr Haruna Godwin (Yaroson Agro Business) each received N1 cardinal each arsenic third-place winners.
Since its constitution successful 2002, the BATN Foundation has executed implicit 350 assemblage improvement projects crossed Nigeria, promoting modern cultivation practices and providing fiscal enactment that helps farmers modulation from subsistence to commercialized farming.
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