The COVID-19 Action Recovery and Economic Stimulus (CARES), a Word Bank-assisted project has expended about N1 billion on various programmes to enhance small-scale businesses and farming activities in Kano State.
The State Programme Coordinator of CARES, Mr Rufa’i Halilu told reporters after inspecting projects executed in some local government areas of the state yesterday in Kura.
CARES project is aimed at expanding support and grants to vulnerable households and firms in the country.
Halilu identified components of the project to include provision of farm input and irrigation facilities, intervention for small businesses, and rehabilitation of feeder roads and toilets in rural markets.
He said people from 38 local government areas of the state benefited from the gesture free.
He said the CARES project would provide assistance for poultry and small farmers, and popcorn machines to youths in the remaining six metropolitan areas of the state in the next few weeks.
“We expended between N900 million and N1 billion on these components of the projects in the last six months that we started the programme,” he said.
Halilu said the project had spent not less than N300 million on farm inputs alone, while about 980 poor farmers so far had benefited.
“The amount was spent on power tillers, planters, insecticides, herbicides, fertilisers, solar-powered water pumping machines, and improved seeds, among others,”
He said the farm inputs would enable the poor rural farmers to improve on their agricultural productivity and achieve food security.
“The roads rehabilitation was to provide access roads for easy transportation of the farm produce from the farms to homes and markets, while the intervention on toilets was to check open defecation,” he said.
Also, the project has as procured solar-powered water pumps worth N33 million for distribution to farmers in Kano State.
The project’s Technical Officer, Mr Nasidi Datti stated this on Sunday in Chidari in the Makoda Local Government Area while test-running some of the pumps before their distribution to the beneficiaries.
Datti said a total of 100 units of the machines would be distributed to 400 irrigation farmers in the state.
According to him, four farmers would be given one set of the machines to irrigate their crops.
The technical officer said the pumps have many advantages over the normal ones.
“This one doesn’t require fuel; it only needs sunlight to operate and it is environment-friendly as it doesn’t pollute the farm and aquatic lives,” he said.
Datti stated that the machine had the capacity to pump at least 24,000 litres of water in one hour.
He also added that the machines would be distributed to the beneficiaries free, to encourage them to boost agricultural productivity.