Sahel Conference urges media to drive food security accountability

The media has been urged to play a more active role in holding governments and other stakeholders accountable for policies and interventions in Nigeria’s food system, particularly through evidence-based reporting and sustained public enlightenment.

The call was made at the Sahel Changemakers Conference which held in Abuja, on Thursday.

The Media Dialogue themed “Building Nigeria’s Food System Architecture: The Role of Media in Driving accountability, Evidence and Public Action”, featured Ntiedo Ekott of the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID), Abdulkareem Mojeed of Premium Times and Israel Boboye of CJID, who discussed the role of media in strengthening accountability, promoting informed public discourse and ensuring that issues affecting the agricultural sector receive adequate attention.

The dialogue formed part of broader conversations at the conference on the need for stronger collaboration among government partners, private sector development partners and other sectors to address challenges confronting Nigeria’s food system.

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Speaking at the conference, Dr Markus Wagner, Country Director, German Development Cooperation, who was represented byDr Karin Jansen, Head of Development Cooperation at the German Embassy, said transforming Nigeria’s agri-food system required coordinated efforts from public, private and development partners.

She said the transformation should deliver nutritional, economic, environmental and social outcomes, including healthy diets, decent employment opportunities for women and young people, protection of natural resources and support for smallholder farmers to adapt to climate change.Jansen said information often existed within organizations but failed to reach the people who needed it, while projects sometimes produced results that were difficult to sustain after their completion.

Also speaking, Nwuneli Okonkwo, Executive Director Sahel Consulting, called for greater integration efforts across sectors, noting that challenges relating to food, nutrition, healthcare and agriculture were interconnected.

She said the country’s poor nutrition outcomes, maternal health challenges and the difficulties confronting farmers could not be addressed independently, saying “policies on agriculture must bear households in mind to succeed as the country needed to move beyond fragmented approaches and develop more coordinated responses that reflected the realities of Nigerian households”.

She described the conference as a call to action, urging stakeholders to break institutional silos and align their efforts.

In his remarks, Temi Adegoroye, Managing Partner Sahel Consulting, said Nigeria’s food system remained poorly coordinated and the large number of people who livelihood depend on it large number of people whose livelihoods depended on it, saying roughly one in three working Nigerians is connected to agriculture and food in one way or another.

According to him, “Climate shocks, insecurity, rising input costs reduce harvest and incomes and shrink diets and erode nutrition. And poor nutrition holds back health and learning.

“Weaker human capital means lower earnings and lower productivity, which leaves the very same households exposed to the next shock.

“The deeper work ahead of us is not about programmes, not about more programmes. It is not about more investment per se. It is about architecture.”