Special Assistant to the President on Agriculture, Hon. Abiodun N. Yunusa, has disclosed President Bola Tinubu’s plan to launch the Green Money Project agicultural initiative meant to create five million jobs for the youths.
The project, according to Yunusa, will be driven through mechanised agriculture and agro-allied business with its value chains.
The SSA disclosed this in a chat with newsmen in Abuja on Sunday, adding that the president wants to make the youths the drivers of agriculture in the country.
”Mr. President is determined to make agriculture attractive to the teaming population of our youths, both young men and women, through the Green Money Project, address unemployment by creating new jobs, boost food security.
”Green Money Project is an intervention initiative that creates and adopts agriculture as a major tool for attracting, sensitising, empowering and activating innate business potential in youths of Nigeria for value and wealth creation,” he stated further.
According to him, the project will be launched in the six geopolitical zones in the country, with emphasis that each zone focuses on producing crops peculiar to its land and ecosystem.
One of the highlights of the project, he said, is to address the inhibitive challenges that make agriculture unattractive to the younger generation.
”We are poised to address the issues of limited access to land, insecurity, poor or lack of infrastructure, funding, limited access to information, access to market, as well as the wrong perception of agriculture.,” the SSA said.
Yinusa who said the president is concerned that 33.3 percent out of the 70 percent of Nigeria’s population which is youths, is unemployed.
He said Nigeria is blessed with vast land resources, which is grossly under utilised: “Nigeria has over 85 million hectares of arable land and only 35 percent is presently being cultivated. What are we doing with the remaining 65 percent? Nothing.”
