Our labour intensive crop production in Nigeria makes our crop output expensive in price & poor in quality.
It limits what we can produce & makes it extremely expensive for large processors to produce for the market whose prices are mostly determined by imported finished goods
You realise you need a cheaper source of raw materials than what the open market (supplied by small holder farmers) can supply
This often leads processors into backward integration via direct or contract farming
We urgently need to ramp up crop production in Nigeria
We should focus less on waste, & more on increasing yields
Our small holder farmers experience such huge wastage because they lack resources to process their produce
Ramping up small scale processing capacity will help to drastically reduce the wastage and empower SH farmers
Increasing small scale processing capacity at the grassroots will drastically cut waste and empower farmers,
While improving yields and increasing mechanized crop production will drive down food costs in the medium and long term
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Bitter leaf is an indigenous African plant; which grows in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa
It is a very important protective food and useful for the maintenance of health and prevention & treatment of various diseases
Its chemical constituents
possess a potent anti-parasitic, anti-tumour, and bactericidal effect. bitter leaf is mainly employed as an agent in treating schistsomiasis, which is a disease caused by parasitic worms
Its also useful in the treatment of diarrhoea and general physical malaise
Remedies made from bitter leaf are used in treating several common ailments in sub- Saharan Africa, including fever, different kinds of intestine complaints, & parasite-induced diseases like malaria
Bitter leaf also helps to cleanse such vital organs of the body like the liver
Banks were (& are) the biggest obstacle to the full functionality of mobile money in Nigeria today
The biggest fear of banks is telcos being allowed to enter the field of banking
Telcos are already huge institutions.
Adding banking to their bottomline would make them bigger
than banks and thus make banks more susceptible to being taken over by telcos or their banking subsidiaries
Over the years, to neutralize the challenges posed by mobile money, banks adopted most of the mobile money innovations in use in other African countries
Mobile money is
a uniquely African innovation.
So Nigerian banks adopted USSD banking, agency banking, and POS terminals
All this made the Nigerian banking system appear very advanced (indeed it is compared to other more developed countries )
TSA, BVN and NIN took plenty of guts and steely resolve to pull through
The border closure leading to massive growth in the domestic price value chain was also another unpopular policy that eventually paid off just in the nick of time
The cashless policy spearheaded by the currency redesign is also another masterstroke (I admit I briefly lost focus of the objectives) that has taken his steely resolve to push through
Today he is hugely unpopular for this policy thrust, but I'm confident that we'll all come
round
Achieving the elusive cashless financial system has seemed like a chimera in Nigeria for over a decade
But as usual it has taken crisis to convince investors (telcos, fintech startups, etc) that the time is ripe to deploy resources towards this potentially huge niche