Lagos – Growth and Employment States (GEMS), an NGO, says it has created 10,000 jobs in rural communities in the country in the last five years.
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The Intervention Manager of the NGO, Mr Richard Ogundele, said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on Friday.
Ogundele gave the assurance that the NGO will continue to teach people how to preserve perishable farm produce better in 2016.
“Our programme has a mandate of creating 10,000 jobs in five years and increasing the incomes of 500,000 poor people.
“At the moment, more than 50 per cent of our perishable produce gets lost, spoilt, and damaged in transit from the farm to the market just because we don’t know how to handle them.
“So, poor handling is a big issue; there is a reduction in shelf life, there is a reduction in quality and there is poor pricing to the actor.
“So, what we are really trying to do is teach them how to handle them better, teach them how to package, how to distribute and improve their sales in marketing.
“This way, they can at least increase their turnover and begin to make more money.
“You will find out that women are used for most of the work and they are not compensated.
“So, we look at the value chain and see how better can we empower women, in particular, along this value chain and make them more beneficial to the value chain, then in turn, benefit from the entire exercise.“
Manager said that the country’s Gross Domestic Product would improve once farmers became better informed on how best to preserve perishable goods. (NAN)