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Graduate Management School in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, empowers State's women

School empowers Rivers women By Godwin Egba Special Correspondent, Port Harcourt

Graduate Management School in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, has said it is supporting President Yar' Adua's Seven-point agenda in the agricultural sector by training rural women in the Niger Delta region.

Mr. Willie Dan Otokolo, registrar general of the private professional institution, disclosed this to Daily Independent in Port Harcourt.

He said the agricultural training programme, tagged, "Agricultural Women Wealth Empowerment programme (AWWEP)" was introduced to train and encourage the poor rural women to go into farming to tackle their poverty level.

Otokolo said the Graduate Management School shares Yar' Adua's vision in developing the agricultural sector, stressing that the way to achieve that vision is to reach out to the grassroots where the rural poor women dominate.

He said the school came up with an initiative called AWWEP to train the rural women in the nine states of the Niger Delta region, which got the support of Rivers State governor's wife, Dame Judith Amaechi, who has passion to assist the less privileged in the society especially women and children through her programme, Empowerment Support Initiative (ESI).

Otokolo said the AWWEP initiative, which was launched in April 2009 by the governor's wife, had trained 17 batches of 3,500 women in snails, grass-cutter, fishery, poultry and livestock farming, stressing, "These are productive areas among others that should be developed to help the small-scale rural poor.

"If we should be talking about vision 2020 for Nigeria to be among developed countries in the world, we should be talking about women empowerment and that is why the Graduate Management School came up with this training, initiative."

According to him, the training programme, which is cost-free, would attract developing partners - states and local government areas, corporate organisations and donor agencies in the Niger Delta region - to sponsor people from their areas.

Otokolo said beneficiaries of the programme could start their size of agro farm with N250,000, N500,000 to N2.5 million based on the investors' business plan, advising that the Graduate Management Training School is ready to partner with any development partner that is willing to provide grants to the beneficiaries to go into their businesses.

He named UBA, Unity, First Bank, Nigeria Agricultural Co-operative and Rural Development banks as well as neighborhood micro-finance banks where agricultural loans could be sourced for agro investment for those trained by the school.

He said the training programme is coming up with a second phase, which is all encompassing to accommodate school leavers, under graduates, graduates, small-scale farmers, unemployed, retirees and interested individuals among others.

The second phase of the training programme, according to him, would be an expanded curriculum for establishment and management of vegetable farming, food processing and packaging, snail, fishery, grass-cutter, poultry and lives stocks farming.

He therefore appealed to states and local government areas of the nine states in the Niger Delta to use the opportunity to empower their people if they are committed to fight poverty in their communities.

Regions : Africa

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