At least, 1500 women from Ogoniland will benefit from an agricultural business training, as part of measures to assuage the impact of oil pollution in the area.
The programme would be sponsored by the HydroCarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP) in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Environment and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).
The training would be facilitated by the Songhai Rivers Development Initiative (Songhai Farms) owned by the Rivers State Government.
A source, who simply gave his name as Jaja explained that many natives of the oil impacted sites in Ogoniland are predominantly farmers, noting that they were forced out of business as a result of the pollution that devastated their farmlands.
He said,”They are peasant farmers and with the oil pollution that took place in the process of oil exploration activities, most of these Ogoni women are out of business.
“As part of the front end activities for the Ogoni clean up, HYPREP, has in collaboration with UNITAR and the Federal Ministry of Environment designed this programme to bring these women here (Songhai Farms) for an agric business training that will last for about two months.
“These Ogoni women, about 1,500 of them will be trained on how to see farming as a business and they will be given starter packs at the end of the training.
“The three organizations are collaborating to offer the training here (Songhai Farms) and we (Songhai Rivers) as facilitators of this programme because we are highly experienced in most of these training will be going back to set them up.
“We are going to do that in cluster arrangement because the cluster arrangement puts them in a position where they can also pull resources together to expand their project,” Jaja said.
Asked when the training will start, the centre Manager said, “The women will be in this farm for the training before the end of this year.”
Jaja further said that arrangements have reached advanced stage to ensure that logistics such as security and other needs for the women will not be a problem during the programme.