Women in Agribusiness Farmers is a community initiative working to strengthen sustainable food supply and to empower women across the agricultural value chain.
We have come together under one umbrella across the six states of the South-West region of Nigeria, through registered cooperative structures in our local government areas. Our work is to bring women in agriculture together under one structure, so that they can farm better, earn better, and stand on their own.
Why our president built it
The cooperative was founded by Omobolanle Adenoye, an agricultural entrepreneur, a community development advocate and a champion of women's empowerment. She is its president, and the reason it takes the form it does.
Her leadership rests on one idea, and it is the idea the whole cooperative is built around. Women should not only take part in agriculture as farmers and traders. They should become owners, processors, investors, entrepreneurs and decision-makers across the value chain.
That is a different ambition from being helped. It is the difference between working in agriculture and holding a business inside it, and it is why this is organised as a cooperative that its members own rather than as a programme run for them.
A major focus of her work is helping women move out of subsistence agriculture and into agribusinesses that can stand commercially: crop and livestock production, agro-processing and value addition, marketing and distribution, cooperative development, access to finance, skills and capacity building, market linkages, and sustainable agricultural practice. The cooperative model is what puts that within reach of an individual woman. Working collectively, members can raise their productivity, improve their incomes and build businesses that hold.
Who belongs here
Whether you are a subsistence farmer, a growing agro-processor, a rural trader or an agribusiness professional, there is a place for you in this community. Many of our members are rural women, widows and young women who had no group of their own before now.
Bringing younger women into agriculture is part of the purpose rather than a side effect of it. The structure exists to improve food productivity and to draw more women into farming, cash crops, livestock and every part of the agri-value chain.
What we are committed to
We are committed to the training and development of our women and youth in modern agribusiness and in subsistence farming, including modern farming methods, agritech tools, and the branding and packaging of organic produce. We also work to improve our members' access to what the work needs: fertiliser, quality seeds and farming tools.
What we are working towards
Our goal is financial independence and a better standard of living for our ever-growing membership, together with a sustained increase in food production.
The wider aim our president works towards is a South-West Nigeria where women are significant players in agriculture and agribusiness, where farming is treated as a viable enterprise rather than as a fallback, and where women have the resources to turn agricultural work into a sustainable business. Her argument, which she makes repeatedly, is that empowering women in agriculture is not only an investment in women. It is an investment in families, in communities, and in the country's food security.