Jonathan-led Govt Helping to Empower Thousands of Agric SME Operators —FIIRO

Federal Institute of Industrial Research, Oshodi (FIIRO), has revealed that the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, in the last four years, has empowered it to train no fewer than 29,435 Nigerians youths and women during its various technology transfer and techno-entrepreneurship development programmes as part of poverty alleviation and job-creation efforts of the government.

The training, according to the Director-General of FIIRO, Dr. (Mrs.) Gloria Elemo, covered production of fruit juice, instant pounded yam flour, cassava bread and confectioneries baking, soaps and detergents, industrial cassava starch, black soap, odorless fufu flour, tomato paste & powder, tie and dye, liquid detergent, essential oil, custard powder, high quality cassava flour, vegetable oil extraction, electroplating, solid mineral milling, among others.

“In continuation of the Institute’s efforts at ensuring the commercialisation of our research and development outputs, the technology transfer training workshops were conducted between 2011 and 2014,” Dr Elemo said in an interview with the Nigerian Tribune.

FIIRO said the president, through improved budgetary allocation to the institute, had committed huge resources to the Institute’s activities towards local content development, food security, nutrition security, development and utilisation of indigenous technologies for the achievement of Transformation Agenda, leading to cassava processing and utilisation technologies.

“The Federal Institute of Industrial Research Oshodi (FIIRO) pioneered Research and Development (R&) work on cassava processing in Nigeria. Some of the cassava products developed by the Institute are: high quality cassava flour, industrial cassava starch (including normal, detoxified, modified; food and pharmaceutical grades), odourless fufu powder, Cassava chips and pellets, Cassava-based adhesives, Cold water starch, cassava noodles, tapioca, mechanised gari, soy-gari, glucose syrup, ethanol, 100 per cent cassava cake and cassava bread,” the FIIRO boss revealed while enumerating the government’s empowerment of the institute to develop technologies and transfer such to small and medium size operators in the country.

Dr. Elemo said the adoption of cassava bread and cassava bread recipe developed by the Institute as national bread by the current administration has the capacity to create over 3 million jobs along the cassava value chain as well as saving the nation a whopping sum of N127billion at 20% substitution of cassava flour for wheat flour.

The DG/CEO, also commended the Federal government for the support it received in the development of High Nutrient Density Biscuit and Drinks for school feeding programme which the government is planning to adopt nationwide for school feeding programme. The Institute also received tremendous support for its R& programme on Ready-to-Use-Therapeutic Foods (RUTF) for treatment of severe malnutrition that could readily replace the imported nuts for the treatment of malnutrition to conserve foreign exchange.

“The institute, also with support from the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture & Rural Development and Lake Chad Research Institute, has produced acceptable bread from 100% local wheat; the institute has also produced cocoa bread with support from the Jonathan-led administration with overall objective to reduce import dependency, save foreign exchange and create jobs,” FIIRO said.

Due to the age of the Institute, infrastructural facilities were dilapidated while the research equipment were obsolete, constituting a major challenge which had to be addressed through gradual rehabilitation of the laboratories as well as equipping the laboratories with the state-of-the-art research facilities.

Through the current administration, FIIRO said it had rehabilitated five specialised laboratories and upgraded some of its physical infrastructures, now the Institute wears a new look; a Nutraceuticals laboratory is currently under rehabilitation under strict supervision of a Professor of Nutraceuticals from the University of Kwazulu Natal University, South Africa; acquired and installed the following state-of-the-art laboratory equipment: GC-Mass Spec, Ultrafast HPLC, Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer, UV-Visible Spectrophotometer, Rapid Moisture Analyser, Flourescent Microscope, NIR Auto Analyzer and Mixolab making the Institute a centre of excellence in West Africa sub-region for products analysis for academia and industry most especially the micro, small and medium enterprises.

SOURCE: http://tribune.com.ng/agriculture/item/29090-jonathan-led-govt-helping-us-to-empower-thousands-of-agric-sme-operators-fiiro

APC E-rats will never acknowledge this, theirs is to clamor for Negative Change.

Jonathan tried in this current 1st tenure. His major problem is that he is not Yoruba, assuming he was from the SW, the media would since given him a very sweet title as the best thing to have happened to Nigeria, unfortunately, Jonathan is from a minority tribe

Hello House,

Apologies for jumping in this way, please check out www.nairafarmer.com and let me know what you think.......It is the nairaland of Agric and The Farming Business in Nigeria..

Regards.