Projects

These are some Cofarm’s past and current projects

Location: Kaduna State

Project Partners: Mercy Corps

Year: 2023-2024

Mercy Corps has a strategic objective that involves applying Market System Development (MSD) approaches across sectors and geographies in Nigeria to transform the lives of vulnerable populations and achieve lasting change at scale. This is the core value of the Empowering Resilient Ginger Farmers (ERGF) program, to support vulnerable ginger farmers—particularly female farmers and their families in Kaduna State—in expanding their ginger productivity to increase incomes and build longer-term financial stability and resilience. As the ginger industry grows in Kaduna State, the ERGF program is a timely, strategic action targeting improving livelihoods including, but not limited to, Kachia, Jama’a, and Jabba Local Government Areas (LGAs) within the state. The ERGF program will implement intervention areas aimed at vulnerable ginger farming populations.

The program will empower women ginger farmers, ultimately addressing economic, social, and sectoral dynamics affecting their capacity to cope, adapt, and transform their lives through regenerative agriculture and market-driven opportunities in the ginger value chain. This initiative will incorporate a Gender Equality and Social Inclusion lens as a cross cutting theme and within the key domains of improving access and control over production, resources, income, leadership, and time use in order to stimulate women’s economic empowerment in the ginger value chain.

Purpose

The Ginger initiative by COFARMS GREENAID LIMITED is designed to create access to the flow of information to ginger farmers to adopt regenerative agricultural practices. This allows ginger farmers to produce quality ginger while regenerating soil health for long term viability. Over the years, COFARMS has targeted farmer adoption practices and extension services. They have trained 12,000 farmers in partnership with GIZ on organic ginger production, with the goal of converting 80,000 ginger farmers to organic farmers by 2030 and increasing organically cultivated ginger farmland to 40,000 hectares. To replicate this, COFARMS would strengthen this initiative by concentrating on 7000 ginger farmers in clusters to tackle challenges related to ginger production, regenerative agriculture and market linkages. The program will integrate gender equality and social inclusion through a women’s economic empowerment approach. It is expected that the intervention areas will achieve the following:

• Introduce and/or strengthen ginger farmers, especially women’s uptake of regenerative agriculture practices by supporting them with extension services
• Together with Mercy Corps, share data, community contacts, and review analysis in order to contribute to a ROI case study on costs and benefits of adopting regenerative agricultural practices for ginger farming.
• Conduct quality assurance for production, in turn supporting greater business opportunities for COFARMS, while identifying strategies that allow for scale up of partnerships with farmers who control their own land.

Objectives

The purpose of this sub-award is to increase farmers’ adoption of regenerative agriculture practices, creating greater farmer sustainability and increased quality assurance of the ginger outputs and a larger ginger input market to strengthen COFARMS business. This initiative would help create incentive for farmers to use regenerative agricultural practices and attain access to high-value markets for producing and selling ginger. Nigerian ginger is regarded as one of the best in the world and is highly valued; hence, exploring various forms of ginger production to weigh the output results and impact on farmers’ socio-economic well being is a meaningful business endeavor.

The initiative will help empower ginger farmers, with a focus on female ginger farmers, who would leverage production for COFARMs and other input markets.

• Support 70 (60% female and 30% male) farmer clusters comprising 280 sub-clusters/7000 ginger farmers to adopt regenerative agriculture practices for ginger production in the next year within their communities through capacity building, improved group dynamics, and positive behavioral change
• Support COFARMS to strengthen their extension model in order to strengthen their competencies for input sales, quality assurance, and offtaking.
• Collaborate with Mercy Corps to encourage women’s economic empowerment through linkages between clusters/farmers and other business development services.
• Jointly conduct a ROI study to measure farmer level ROI for adoption of regenerative agriculture practices for ginger production

Project Partners (USAID FEED THE FUTURE, WIN-ROCK)

Project Location: Kaduna, Kebbi, Niger, Benue, Ebonyi, Cross River and Delta

Year: 2023 to 2024

After nine months of Ukraine-Russia conflict, rural households are increasingly affected with many forced to scale down or abandon agricultural activities due to disruptions in supply chains and price volatility of key agricultural products including fertilizers. This has forced some farmers to either reduce or abandon agricultural production as a coping mechanism, despite its implication on low productivity and poverty.
If the conflict persists, farmers may find it extremely difficult to apply fertilizer to their farms in 2023 and this may lead to abysmal drop in productivity and erode the gains recorded by Extension Activity in the past years. The Extension Activity supports alternative use of fertilizer to mitigate the impact, hence it partners with COFARMS, to promote the Smallholder farmers Bio-products adoption model designed to enable smallholder farmer to adopt organic fertilizer as an MIP in their agricultural practices.

The Smallholder farmers Bio-products adoption model

Activity type: Training of Smallholder Farmers on Bio-products use to enhance productivity

Target: 5,700 smallholder Farmer on the use of Bio-products

Facilitators: COFARMS, MSMEs, State ADPs and Extension Activity

Project Partners: GIZ NICOP

Project Location: Kaduna State

Year: 2019-2022

GIZ NICOP partnered with COFARMS to work with some of its partners and farmers to strengthen their capacity and support them in organic ginger production for the 2020 planting season. The initial support targeted Jaba, Zango Kataf, Kachia, Kagarko, and Jamai Local Government Areas of Kaduna State, and a total number 6000 farmers who were to be trained. However, due to the COVID 19 pandemic and the restrictions posed thereof as well as some insecurity issues in some of the LGAs in Kaduna, COFARMS could only train a total of 1770 farmers and out of this only 154 got into organic ginger production for this farming season. NICOP intends to revise the partnership with COFARMS to reflect the reality of the pandemic and support all the targeted farmers for organic ginger production. The amendment reflects the revised schedule of training to equip the remaining number of farmers for the 2021 ginger farming season.

The training will be done while trainer and trainees are strictly observing the government guideline on prevention of COVID-19 including hand washing, wearing of face masks, social distancing and use of sanitizers.

Objectives

• To promote production of organic ginger with focus to improving agronomic skills and practices for towards the same.
• To provide access to affordable farm inputs and production support for organic ginger farming
• To provide access to market for organic ginger.
• Through B2B linkages provide possible markets for other ginger products and services towards the same.

Goal of the Partnership

NICOP is focusing on interventions that will demonstrate innovation in its approaches by engaging with partners whose approach and scale have the potential to deliver on its objectives and whose business provides a ready-made market for primary producers.

The goal of the collaboration will be for production, and market linkage for organic certified ginger to the international market. The results will not only be used for a proof of concept for organic ginger farming and certification, but the proposed business model will also be used for replication going forward. This will be implemented with a gender focus to promote and ensure gender inclusion thus reducing poverty and increasing economic opportunities for small holder farmers.

Cofarms is implementing a resilient market structure that will increase market linkages for small holder farmers, create good/affordable storage that will allow the consumption of particular commodity even after season and using green energy to prolong commodity shelf life. This resilience is crucial in ensuring food security, economic stability, and the well-being of communities worldwide.

Project Partners: Hervest
Project location: Kwara, Niger, Oyo, Kaduna, Benue

Year: 2021-2022
Cofarms in collaboration with Hervest for women carried out fund a female farmer project where 2500 women were trained in Good Agronomic practices across Oyo, Ogun, Benue, Kaduna , Niger and Kwara states, after capacity Building for these female farmers 250 hectares of Maize and Rice were produced in Niger state and Oyo state where these women were provided funding support and technical support to produce the aforementioned crops under the supervision of extension agents, market linkage was also provided where farmers sold products to at harvest.

Activity – Capacity building, Farm management, project management and project implementation.

Partners- Diageo Guinness Nigeria and Zowasel.

Project location: Kwara, Oyo, Ekiti, Ondo, Ogun State

Year: 2023-2025

Activity – Outgrower, Farm management, Extension service and Aggregation.

Cofarms in collaboration with Guinness Nigeria is implementing  the Southwest Regenerative Sorghum production Project under the Guiness project if increasing local raw material production to reach 20,000 sorghum farmers by 2030 in the south west. As of 2023, a total of 500 farmers are reached who cultivated 500 hectares of sorghum across Kwara north, Kwara central and Gbu GBu areas of Kwara state. And also, a total of 3000 farmers’ data were captured and training commenced for the 2024 project. Guinness being the Offtaker and Cofarms being the Outgrower and aggregators.

Project partner: Friska Food

Project location: Kwaya kusar, Biu local government area Borno state

Year: 2019-2020

Activity: training, production and management, input provision and funding

Borno women go-organic is a project that empowered 200 women in Kwaya Kusar and Biu local government of Borno state in partnership with Friska Food. The project goal is to support the women farmers within the participating locations to go organic. A total of 200 hectres of organic farm was produced for maize, rice, soybean and cowpea. Te project was in collaboration with the state government, ministry of agriculture and ministry of women affairs.

Project partner: Friska Food

Project location: Kwaya kusar, Biu local government area Borno state

Year: 2019-2020

Activity:

The COFARMS Regenerative Food Forestry Project is a project by COFARMS designed to support high climate change impacted and vulnerable states/region in Nigeria to mitigate the effect of climate change and support smallholder farmers build resilience in food production and implementing a resilient food supply/distribution system to improve on food security and reduce food waste in Nigeria. This project is as the result of recent increasing impact of climate change around Nigeria as smallholder farmers are being faced with irregular rainfall that affect planting season and young crop in the farm, increased drought, increase flooding, increase in global average temperature, depleted soil due to over usage of farm chemical. This mentioned problems affect food production, increase loss in soil nutrient and in long time the Nigeria food security agenda. It is against these that the COFARMS GREENAID REVOLUTION LTD is building a team to improve on the COFARMS Regenerative Food Forestry Project that will provide solution to food crisis, climate impact of flooding and drought, poor soil quality, high cost of farm inputs (by developing alternative resilient inputs) and managing and reducing food waste. The first step of improving food security is never loss any food you produce.

The project is a resilient forestry and seasonal food production system that boost biodiversity, improve on soil nutrients regeneration, reduce soil disturbances and tillage, reduce water evaporation, conserved soil water and moisture, improve on the production of nutrient-dense food and allow smallholder farmers earn Eight times a year from their farm by harvesting multiple crops and commodities from a singular farm. The project target to reduce the impact of climate change in vulnerable states like Borno, Adamawa, Gombe, Kaduna, Zamfara, Katsina, Kano, Jigawa, Kebbi, Niger, bayelsa, Anambra and Kwara state. The project will also work on improving soil nutrients in the 36 state in Nigeria and the FCT.

Project partner: Friska Food

Project location: Kaduna, Benue, Nasarawa, Niger, FCT, Plateau state

Year: 2019-2020

Activity:

The Ginger seed-preneurship project is a project by COFARMS GREENAID LIMITED designed to support COFARMS in meeting her farmers seed needs and also support expansion from Kaduna to five other states (Benue, Nasarawa, Niger, FCT, Plateau). The seed-Preneurship model is a young seed entrepreneurship model designed as an out grower model that allows young entrepreneurs to produce quality Ginger parent stock and deliver it to Cofarms for propagation. COFARMS over the years trained 12,000 farmers in partnership with GIZ on organic Ginger production with the goal of converting 80,000 Ginger farmers to organic farmers by 2030 and increase organic cultivated ginger farmland to 40,000 hectares. To achieve this this goals COFARMS needs to tackle the major challenges in achieve this goal which is shortage of Ginger seeds, farmland and knowhow.

PROJECT GOALS/OUTCOMES:
The goal is to partner with, train and support 2000 Seed-Preneurs in six years to produce 10,000,000,000 Ginger seeds and cultivate 40,000 Hectares of Ginger farm across six states in Nigeria (Kaduna, Plateau, Benue, Niger, Nasarawa and FCT) in the next six years.

This project will also help in providing ginger planting materials to 80,000 smallholder farmers across the six participating states and boost Nigerian Ginger production by 400,000 metric tonnes of dry split ginger, create thousands of jobs and boost rural economy GDP with $1,000,000,000 ($1 billion) in six years.

Increase ginger seed production to boost production of Ginger for smallholder’s farmers in Kaduna, Plateau, Benue, Nasarawa, Niger and FCT.

To create business opportunities for young seed entrepreneurs across participating states who will employ two supportive, strengthen activities within the Ginger value chain for all players to create better market opportunities for Farmers, Seed-Preneurs and COFARMS.

Make ginger seeds readily available and affordable to farmers with an opportunity of ginger seed loan to smallholder farmers to support farm expansion.

The Project will build Seed-Preneurs and farmers capacity on climate change impact and support them to be more climate change adaptive and resilient, to understand the necessary preparation before, during and after the negative impact of climate change., build farmers capacity on organic agriculture to boost Ginger production, ginger traceability and food safety and to help farmers access land, inputs, training and create a better market for their produce to make them more economic farmers.