Linking financial and agricultural innovations for women farmers’ resilience in Nigeria led by Prof. Opeyemi Ayinde from University of Ilorin. Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is dominated by smallholder farmers who have limited ways to cope with catastrophic droughts and other weather-related shocks. These challenges are particularly severe for women farmers in Nigeria and other developing countries where cultural norms and commercial practices limit their access to financial and insurance markets that could help them to manage that risk. This project is testing the interlinked credit, index insurance and cultivation of stress tolerant maize varieties to strengthen women productivity, income and resilience.
This project provides evidence on instruments that help women smallholder farmers to better cope with agriculture-related risks that dominate Nigeria’s agricultural sector.
This project also supports a number of USAID and Feed the Future objectives in Nigeria. As outlined in the USAID Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS) for Nigeria, this project contributes to Objective 1 of inclusive economic growth by building income, food security and private sector contributions. The project also supports the Special Objective of greater stability and early recovery by creating new ways for farmers to become resilient to weather-related shocks. These objectives overlap with Feed the Future activities in Nigeria that seek to improve farmers’ access to finance, agricultural inputs and technologies for strengthening resilience with a particular focus on empowering women and youth.
Through its private-sector partners, the project is creating an enabling environment for rural smallholder men and women farmers to access financial services and insurance that could increase their productivity and resilience to shocks. It will promote the adoption of stress-tolerant seeds while building the capacity of farmers, extension agents and researchers in Nigeria.
