The Director General of International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) Dr Nteranya Sanginga, has revealed that agribusiness helps to transform African agriculture.

He made this known while delivering a presentation titled the ‘African Agricultural Transformation: The IITA Agripreneur Approach to Job Creation’ today at the Centre for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, in Germany.

According to Sanginga, “Part of the challenges facing Africa is the ageing population of the active food-producing farmers which is roughly 60 years. We need a new generation of farmers to produce our food in the future. Also, the rate of food importation in the continent is $35 billion per year, which is estimated to increase to $110 billion if nothing is done by 2025. Yet the continent has over 60 percent of the arable land in the world and over 60 percent of the young people who constitute the larger percentage of the population in Africa are jobless and not contributing to its economic development.

We need to mobilize this dynamic, vibrant, resilient, and active sector of our population, give them support to succeed in agribusiness and innovative agricultural enterprises through training, incubation, and start-ups, and ensure Africa’s, if not the world’s food supplies in the future.’’

IITA established the IITA Youth Agripreneurs in 2012 to train young people from diverse academic backgrounds towards revitalizing the agricultural sector through food production, food safety, as well as research and technology dissemination to African farmers.

IITA and IYA have trained over 2,000 youth in countries like DR Congo, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, and Tanzania along various value chains, many of them establishing agribusiness enterprises.

In the same vein, IITA set up the Business Incubation Platform (BIP) in its headquarters in Ibadan, to scale out its research and technologies to help ensure that 11 million people are raised out of poverty and redirect the sustainable use of 7.5 million hectares of degraded land. BIP hires young men and women in its operations, who are also trained in various aspects of agricultural production, processing, marketing, and networking; and works with start-up agribusinesses set up by youth that have undergone incubation with IITA and IYA.

Meanwhile, a beneficiary of IYA, Mercy Haruna Wakawa the founder and Managing Director of a successful agribusiness company Confianza Global Resources, that processes groundnut into oil and cake for livestock feed has attributed her success to the training which was organized by IITA Youth Agripreneurs (IYA) at the IITA Kano station.

Mercy says groundnut processing is a profitable business. Confianza Global Resources currently employs four youths from the host community. The business has also created livelihood opportunities for many women in groundnut processing and marketing in the host and neighboring communities.

Also, Zaccheus Izuwa the proprietor of Sorgi Enterprises, which is into grain supply, seed production, and consultancy. He started the business in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, after incubation with IITA in 2015. The business found a niche in production and aggregation of sorghum grains, making its first sale in 2016. Sorgi aims to become the leading producer and supplier of clean high-quality sorghum grains in West Africa. It now provides seeds and grains to big private sector partners such as Honeywell Flour Mills and Guinness Nigeria Ltd., and to the IITA Business Incubation Platform, IITA’s commercialization arm, which produces Aflasafe, a biocontrol product that controls aflatoxin, and NoduMax, a bioinoculant that fixes nitrogen to improve the yield of legumes, such as soybean.

According to Izuwa it was the challenge of youth unemployment across Nigeria and Africa at large and the ever increasing hunger threat that were the major propelling force for his business.

IITA will showcase to stakeholders in the agricultural sector in Germany how it is contributing to the transformation and development of African agriculture through agricultural innovations that meet the continent’s most pressing challenges of hunger, malnutrition, natural degradation, and youth unemployment.