By Muhammad Amaan
The Federal Government of Nigeria said it is collaborating with the World Bank to scale up Rural Access and Agricultural Marketing Project (RAAMP) in Nigeria.
The Minister of State for Agriculture and Food Security, Senator Aliyu Abdullah stated this at a news conference held in Abuja.
He said that the RAAMP project was ongoing and had been implemented across 19 States of the federation.
The minister said that out of the 19 states, 16 have already passed laws establishing their state’s rural access rule authority alongside the state rule fund.
“This is a very strong collaboration with the World Bank, almost all the states of the Federation are asking for onboarding.
“This will also afford them the opportunity to benefit from the massive success this project is delivering.
“While it is agreed that we are going to scale up RAMP, we must include sustainability elements,” he said.
Senator Abdullahi who underscored the importance of the rural access and agricultural marketing project, said most of the movement in rural areas were due to agricultural marketing.
“We realised that agricultural marketing is an important component. In fact, most of the movement in rural areas is due to agricultural marketing.
“Most of our population live in the rural areas, so that underscores the importance of the rural access and agricultural marketing project,” he said.
He said that the ministry is working to promote the role of rural roads in delivering its mandate of ensuring food security.
The minister said that this project was intended to institutionalise the idea of developing rural areas in Nigeria.
According to him, if that is done it would create new development domains, while also developing agricultural clusters that would support economic diversification drive.
In a remark, the National Coordinator of RAAMP, Aminu Mohammed, said the objective of the project was improvement of rural routes as well as supporting improvement of agricultural marketing.
He said that RAAMP is in tandem with President Bola Tinubu’s quest to attain food security in the country.
