The Nigerian Minister of Environment, Balarabe Abbas Lawal on Thursday commended the World Bank’s 50×2030 initiative for ACReSAL.
He also revealed that the ACReSAL project has brought collaboration to the three presiding ministries involved in the project implementation.
Mr. Lawal disclosed this at the ACReSAL 50×2030 Program Inauguration held in Abuja, the Nigerian capital. According to him, the program is aimed at boosting agriculture, based on the issue of data which he described as a neccesity to address problems in the agriculture and environment sectors.
The 50×2030 program brought together by the FAO and World Bank is meant to improve activities in the agricultural sector, laying more significance on data.
“We must have facts and figures, we have found out that there has been a lot of data deficit in our agriculture sector. I think we need data to address all these. It is important we work with the accurate data to address the issues of climate change and other environmental conditions that affect the daily lives of people, the Minister said.
“We need to think and plan ahead to solve the agriculture and environmental problems. This will be very efficient only if we work with data.
“Bearing in mind that agriculture is our main stay because many Nigerians depend on it, we are trying to prevent drought. As you may understand, when there is a drought in an environment, it can lead to migration”, he added.
The National Project Coordinator for the ACReSAL, Mr. Abdulhamid Umar said the 50×2030 will provide strength and capacity for the 50 World Bank nations to capture and gather reliable data from the agriculture sector. The data to be collected he said will be used by decision makers to enhance food productivity.
He added that in Nigeria, ACReSAL was identified as a veritable platform to reach out to the nineteen northern states and FCT to capture reliable data from farmers and what they produce.
The Community Revolving Fund Deliverable arm of ACReSAL, according to him, aims to strengthen citizens at the grassroots level. “The funds are made available to residents at the community level wherein they will be empowered to be able to enhance agricultural and other livelihood activities at the household level”, he said.
The Statistician General of the Federation, Yemi Adeniran said the survey program is also driven by the National Bureau of Statistics because, “it has to do with agricultural data for the country”.
He also stated that the project will revolutionise agriculture data in Nigeria and made it consistently available for the next five years.
“Every aspect of agriculture, we will be able to provide indicators. We will be looking at livestock production, poultry, fishing and forestry, amongst others. We will also be having data on climate, environment and water availability like dams. It will be a very comprehensive data available to the government for policy making, decision taking and intervention projects in the agricultural sector”, Mr. Yemi revealed.
Senior Economist and the 50×2030 Program Lead Strategy, Abul Azad said the project is a global statistics and climate change program that aims to work on minimising climate change data dearth by 2030.
“Our target is to work with 50 countries and strengthen the use of data for policy making and promote evidence smart agriculture, Mr. Azad said.
“It takes advantage of World Bank’s resources to implement agriculture climate programs and the technical assistance also comes from the World Bank and FAO.
“ACReSAL is a World Bank investment to strengthen a sustainable and climate resilient landscape management in Nigeria. So, our contribution is through technical assistance and capacity building for the National Bureau of Statistics and the three presiding ministries to use data for policy making”, he added.