Opia Kumah advises Nigeria to take advantage of MDG lessons in implementing SDGs

NaijaAgroNet:

The Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) office in Nigeria, Mr. Opia Kumah has advised Nigeria to take advantage of lessons learnt from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to tackle implementation of the recently promulgated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), reports NaijaAgroNet.

Addressing the State-level workshop on ‘Data Mapping for the Sustainable Development Goals in Nigeria” at the weekend in Kaduna, Mr. Kumah who was represented by the Economic Advisor in the state, Ojijo Odhiambo, described workshop as timely given its coming two months after the highly successful national-level meeting on the same subject held in Abuja and hardly two weeks after the Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDGs Indicators Meeting in Bangkok, Thailand.

“As you are well aware, the Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators which brings together member states of the United Nations, Nigeria included, and regional and international agencies, was created by the United Nations Statistical Commission in March this year with the mandate of proposing a global indicator framework,” he said.

The results of this global initiative, he said, will be considered by the Statistical Commission at its 47th session in March 2016. He stressed that the work of the group has nonetheless become an important reference point and input into national level activities related to data for monitoring and reporting on the SDGs.

While the Inter-agency and expert group is yet to complete its work, he pointed out that it is now clear that the international community favours a limited number of indicators for monitoring progress towards the SDGs.

“In the area of poverty, for instance, the group has just adopted the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) as an indicator for measuring progress towards the SDGs,” he said.

Emphasising that this is a clear testimony of the desire of the international community to capture and measure progress towards the SDGs in more qualitative and comprehensive terms. 

“As we deliberate on the indicators for measuring progress in Nigeria over the next two days, we should therefore keep in mind the need to evolve and adopt those indicators which are broad, qualitative and contextually relevant to our unique national situation,” he charged.

According to Kumah, regarding data for the SDGs implementation, monitoring and reporting, the critical challenge facing Nigeria is not the lack of knowledge of what needs to be done but rather how to apply the available knowledge and lessons learnt from the MDGs implementation over the past fifteen years.

“The country has learnt invaluable lessons from the MDGs implementation process. We fully appreciate the challenges that the country faces with respect to data. We know what works and what does not. We know where the gaps are. We know where the bottlenecks are. We know which indicators are particularly problematic to measure. We ought to use this rich knowledge base to evolve the most plausible implementation strategies for tracking, capturing and processing the SDGs indicators in a comprehensive, coordinated and efficient manner,” Kumah said.

+Remmy Nweke (ITRealms) @ITRealms
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Ghana scales MDG’S deadline

NaijaAgroNet

Ghana has scaled the hurdle of the 2015 deadline set by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and World Food Summit (WFS) for countries of the world to bring down the proportion of those living without food by half, reports NaijaAgroNet.  

The Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Regional Representative for Africa,Mr Bukar Tijani, said around one person in four persons in Sub-Saharan Africa suffered from undernourishment, down from one in three persons 25 years ago.

This assertion was made recently by Mr.Tijani while speaking at the launch of the first edition of the FAO’s Regional Overview of Food Insecurity in Africa (SOFI) 2015 report, on the theme, “African Food Security Prospects Brighter than Ever” in Accra, Ghana.

NaijaAgroNet gathered that the report presented the key undernourished figures for Sub-Saharan Africa and examined the factors driving the progress made in food security in the Africa region.

The documents, NaijaAgroNet also reports, discussed successful experiences in African countries to institute and sustain policies, which have contributed to improve nutritional and food security.

It was also disclosed that Ghana was able to reach this far, because it has partnered with the private sector and civil society in implementing and reviewing policies and programmes to develop the agriculture sector.

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Presidential aide tasks youths to embrace agriculture

 

Anthony Nwakaegho /NaijaAgroNet

 The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Dr Precious Gbeneol has called on youths to take advantage of the various policies of the government especially in agriculture and embrace it as a means of viable employment.

Dr Gbeneol gave the charge on the occasion of World Poverty Day, and said that the most sustainable way to eradicate poverty is to engage more people to work and called on the private sector to come up with more creative ways of creating employment as a means of alleviating poverty.

NaijaAgroNet noted from presidential adviser to MDGs that the country has made meaningful progress in trying to eradicate extreme poverty since it adopted the MDGs in 2000 alongside other countries.

She explained that the country has partially accomplished goal one by reducing the proportion of people suffering from extreme poverty and hunger by 50 per cent ahead of the target date of 2015 and stressed that the country was honoured earlier in the year for the feat at the week-long 38th session of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)  event in Rome.

The Ministry of Agriculture, she said had been able to train 5,000 youths in 10 different value chains, provided start-up packages for 6,000 youths, as well as access to credit and other inputs through the Growth Enhancement Scheme (GES); trained 2,500 women in poultry, bull fattening, sheep and goat production, bee keeping, crop value chains and extension, among others in the past three years.

NaijaAgroNet learnt that FAO gave the award to Nigeria for being able to reduce the number of its citizens suffering from hunger from 19.31 million in 1990 and 1992 to 13.38 million in 2010 and 2012.

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Kaduna women, youths train on bull husbandry

Anthony Nwakaegho/NaijaAgroNet

A two-week training has been mapped out for the training of women and youths by Kaduna State in bull husbandry by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD) in collaboration with office of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and College of Agriculture and Animal Science in Kaduna

Funding for the training was from the MDGs office to provide skills in fattening of cattle for the women and youths in the state, as gathered by NaijaAgroNet.

Opening the training, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina represented by the Director of Planning, Research and Statistic in the Ministry, Umar Farouk Hussaini decried Nigerian's reliance on imported food, stressing that the training was part of Federal Government's desire to build the capacity of 8,000 youths and women in various agricultural fields including fishery, cassava production, animal husbandry and poultry.

"Whatever we are providing here is a starter pack to the participants as something they should use to get a take-off in their lives. At the end of the training, bulls and feeds among others will be distributed to the participants to start with and sell later on when they are fattened," he said,

Provost of College of Agriculture and Animal Science, Dr Balarabe Jahun informed NaijaAgroNet that Nigeria spends over $5.2 billion annually on food importation, which is equivalent to 48 per cent of the country's total gross income.

He lamented that if the citizens of any nation no matter how rich they may depends on food importation the country  will still remain in a poor state and that is the situation in Nigeria.

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