By Daniel Tyokua
The Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) has inaugurated a committee to pilot the implementation of $4.5m FADAMA COVID-19 Action Recovery and Economic Stimulus (CARES) project.
FCT Mandate Secretary for Agriculture and Rural Development Secretariat, Mallam Abubakar Ibrahim during the inauguration and a sensitization workshop on FCT FADAMA CARES for top policy makers at FCTA and Area Council levels, said the programme will rescue farmers from the COVID-19 impact.
Ibrahim who is the chairman of the committee, said the Programme is a World Bank Budget support to the Federal Capital Territory Administration for Non-Discretionary expenditure which is targeted at supporting existing and newly emerging vulnerable and poor households, Agricultural Value Chains, and Micro & Small Enterprises (MSEs) that have been negatively impacted by the COVID 19 Pandemic.
According to him, the programme would be implemented using the World Bank Programme for Result (P for R) financing model which is a relatively new concept of Programmes/Projects financing.
Ibrahim revealed that the model requires the FCT Administration to invest its own resources first by funding Delivery Platforms to start implementation, while the World Bank reimburses the FCTA after verification of achieved results by Independent Verification Agents (IVAs) in line with agreed prices and targets earlier set for all Disbursement Linked Indicators (DLIs).
He said: “For us in Result Area 2, our objective is to Increase Food Security and Safe Functioning of Food Supply Chain under the FCT CARES programme.
“With a set of diverse but very critical programme stakeholders in this Result Area, this event becomes imperative in order to carry along these stakeholders from the onset of Programme implementation”
On his part, the coordinator FCT FADAMA CARES, Usman Adangara said the programme is designed to further build the capacities of key program stakeholders who are expected to play significant roles during the course of implementation.
“The FCT FADAMA CARES program has been mandated to implement three disbursement linked indicators and has a set target of reaching 12,283 individual farmers with grants to support recovery activities of their various value chains as well as to upgrade 17 wet markets across the FCT”
He said the programme will be implemented within the period of 2 years.
