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“The government finances are mostly accessed by portfolio farmers, political farmers, because when you design a program for rural women and you are telling them to bring a level 14 officer as a guarantor, or you are telling them to bring a landed property, these are constraints that are affecting rural women.
That is why we mentioned agricultural insurance to go hand-in-hand with the credit facilities.” Women farmers under the auspices of the Small Scale Women’s Farmers Organisation in Nigeria (SWOFON) have expressed frustration over the high cost of credits.
“What we are saying is that we should be gender-sensitive in designing our financial program, owing to all these constraints that women are suffering, let us streamline it to the womenfolk, in such a way that there should be some kind of understanding”, Mercy added.
He said: “That is why one of the strong recommendations is that the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and the State Ministry of Agriculture should create a budget plan, a yearly budget plan on strengthening access to credit.
Secretary of the organisation, Nnanna Mercy, called on the Federal Government to be gender-sensitive in designing financial programmes that would make women farmers have easy access to loans.
ActionAid Nigeria has appealed to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and financial institutions to scale up the provision of loan facilities to women farmers, who have been described as making up 60 per cent of players in the agriculture sector..
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