THIRD NATIONAL FADAMA DEVELOPMENT PROJECT (FADAMA III)

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The development objective of Third National Fadama Development (Fadama III) Project for Nigeria is to sustain ably increase the incomes of fadama users. By increasing their incomes, the project will help reduce rural poverty, increase food security and contribute to the achievement of a key millennium development goal. The project aims at sustainably increasing the incomes of Fadama resource users by directly delivering resources to the beneficiary rural communities, efficiently and effectively, and empowering them to collectively decide on how resources are allocated and managed for their livelihood activities and to participate in the design and execution of their subprojects. There are six components to the project. The first component of the project is capacity building, local government, and communications and information support. This component will include: (a) capacity building support for community organizations; (b) capacity building support to local governments; and (c) communications and information support. The second component of the project is small-scale community-owned infrastructure. Despite recent successes in addressing the infrastructure constraint through Fadama I and Fadama II projects, much more remains to be done to improve existing low levels of infrastructure and services. Grant resources will be allocated annually to each of the participating Fadama community associations (FCAs) for implementing priority demand-driven community-owned productive infrastructure investments of the public good type. The third component of the project is advisory services and input support. Under this component the project will finance: (a) advisory services - the project will provide support to empower fadama users farmers/pastoralists and other economic interest groups (EIGs) working within their organizations and through their local government councils (LGAs) to purchase advisory services from both public and private sources; and (b) input support - this facility involves the adoption of new technology by the farmers to enhance their financial capacity to purchase farm inputs (mainly seeds, fertilizers and agrochemicals) and to build savings from incremental earnings to finance future purchases. The fourth component of the project is support to the agricultural development programs. This component will provide support to the Agricultural Development Program (ADP) to carry out the following specific and limited functions: (a) support to advisory service providers; (b) quality assurance of advisory services; (c) training of facilitators; (d) sponsored research and on-farm demonstrations; and (e) training of extension staff. The fifth component of the project is asset acquisition for individual. A matching grant will be used as seed money to empower smallholder and poor farmers to acquire capital assets which they will use to undertake a wide range of small-scale income generating activities as well as improve farmers' access to markets and complementary support that add value to farm produce. The six component of the project is project management, monitoring, and evaluation.