Paul Ogbuokiri The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), through its Sub-regional Office for West Africa (SRO-WA), in collaboration with Compass Global Consulting recently engaged delegates of women and youths on regional business forums.
The Forum was also in partnership with more than 350 coalition partners. Under-Secretary-General and ECA Executive Secretary, Dr. Vera Songwe explained that the purpose of this conversation was on how the West African woman could leverage the knowledge, the innovation that exists; leverage the vibrancy they have and ensure they can take their businesses one notch higher to the global sub-region and take advantage of markets that are further beyond in the east and the west.
According to the Minister of Finance, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, it is imperative for society to empower youth and women.
“We are hopeful that this will be an effective avenue for empowering youths and women entrepreneurs and address the unemployment challenges we have in Africa, as well as address the need to create jobs.” Also, highlighting the major gaps in the African educational systems and its impact on productivity; the Sub-Regional Director, West Africa Office – UNECA, Mrs. Ngone Diop, said,
“The region’s capacity of innovation remains weak mainly because of the deficiencies in the education systems. Also speaking, Senegalese Fashion Designer and Engineer, Mrs. Diatou Ndiaye, lamented that farmers’ greatest challenge is finance and poor road network,
“Access to the market is a greatest challenge of all the farmers, even the local farmers live so far away from the city, they don’t have means to get to the urban. No transport, no financial means to transport the products.”
Mrs. Ndiaye mother of two said that what the farmers do was, “just to stay in their farms and wait for buyers to come, so in that case the buyers have the power to fix its price, so the farmer just accepts the price.”
So the forum connected her to Vivian from Kenya who agreed to make it easy for the farmers in Senegal , when she said, “I have met a lady from Kenya, Vivian Opondoh, who proposed digital services to promote market access to markets to farmers. I will work with her and bring the digital services to Senegal as a solution to the access to market issue.”
While Tenin Nana Kouyate from Mali provides Agric-Technology to farmers in Mali, the challenge of farmers is that they have limited income.
The rural areas have no internet access and 70 per cent of these farmers are illiterates. “Digital education was brought on tv and smart phones introduced to the farmers in the rural areas, and we use a set of Agricbox that encloses our soft wares, which is also connected to farmers Television set.
It allows farmers to access information they need, turning on good Agricultural practices even selling the productions directly from the platforms, all the services are broadcast verbally in local languages with or without internet connection and Agric box is also available with more than 20,000 users .
The Team Lead, Administrative & Project Support based in the United Kingdom, Mrs. Nikky Ehinlanwo said;“I came in to work alongside with the Compass Global (CG) on this project, The West Africa Business Forum.
CG was actually working alongside to bring this event into Nigeria, they worked alongside with the United Nation Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), they put together all the companies, all the group members and all the youths at this event to ensure that this event was a success.
We have been able to achieve a lot of all the 15 countries of the whole of Africa that were brought to Nigeria to ensure that it was a success.