More than 112 500 households received seed and fertilizer during FAO's Rainy Season Response which began in June, 2018. Harvests are anticipated from September and will support household's food and nutrition needs.

If Yagana could make one dream come true, she would be healthy. Healthy enough to plant 100 rows of maize in an afternoon, to scale up her sale of bags of sweet and bitter cola nut, peppers and other traditional spices. For the last two years, she has struggled to farm, relying on the support of friends and family, and has struggled even more to pay the monthly fee to rent a hectare of land a few kilometers outside her village of Maisandari, in Damaturu, Yobe State. As part of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) rainy season programme in Yobe in northeastern Nigeria, Yagana’s and more than 112 500 households received crop seed and fertilizer. “I have four children depending on me – one of them I adopted because their parents died.”

At ages ranging between 7 and 10 years old, they are not old or knowledgeable enough to help her work the land, especially for this critical period, which, as the major planting season, casts a critical lifeline for the most at-risk smallholders. In the three most-affected northeastern states of Nigeria, namely Adamawa, Borno and Yobe, most smallholders continue to rely on rain-fed agriculture and have little access to relatively expensive irrigation resources that would free them from the caprice of nature. Yobe, like most of the region, is largely agriculture-dependent – more than 80 percent of the estimated 1.4 million people practice subsistence agriculture in the form of farming, livestock and fisheries as their primary source of food and income.

Hadiza, a mother of six and also based in Maisandari, is hoping to increase her production from the millet, cowpea and ground nut seed she received. She plans to use the profits to pay school fees. “I am hopeful for my children, they need to go to school. Planting and selling will help us to make ends meet, though it may not be enough,’’ said Hadiza. She and her husband were not able to cultivate during the most violent period of the crisis, and had to rely on the sometimes-precarious manual labour jobs he travelled city to city, village to village to secure. “We mainly used his wages to buy food but the money cannot stretch too far. It is much better for us to plant our own food, both to sell and make more money available for other expenses, as well as cut down on the cost of food,” she said.  In the northeast, due to the nine year insurgency against armed combatants, food prices are high, particularly for staple foods like maize, rice and millet.

FAO is accountable to women like Yagana, Hadiza and hundreds of thousands more farmers in its efforts to improve their livelihoods. “During the rainy season programme and throughout all our initiatives, whether emergency or recovery or development oriented, FAO is accountable to the people we seek to assist,” said Suffyan Koroma, FAO Representative in Nigeria.

As part of its Accountability to Affected Populations activities, the Organization involves households in the design and implementation of projects through participatory needs assessments and feedback mechanisms such as complaint desks and anonymous hotlines. “If there is any issue with the seed they received, farmers are informed in their local languages how to register their grievances and can all our team at any time,” said Koroma. In this way, FAO and its programmatic partners - including the local NGOs it works with across Nigeria to deliver services - know what impact programmes are having on the communities and can support their complaints and address their problems rapidly, in turn preventing or curbing sexual abuse and other forms of exploitation.

Contact Person

Patrina Pink
Communication and Reporting Officer
FAO Maiduguri Sub-Office 
Borno State, Nigeria
E-mail: [email protected]