Luanda – The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative to Angola, Guerda Barreto, stressed this Tuesday, in Luanda, the need to increasingly invest in human capital training, for the development of agri-food value chains.
Guerda Barreto who was speaking in the workshop on “The Higher Education Institutions Role for the Development of Agribusiness”, highlights that there is a needed to take advantage of the local knowledge to meet the best solutions adapted to the national context, the reality of the communities and to their ecosystems in addition to the climate change challenges.
She stressed that it is important to take advantage of the solid foundations on which several universities and institutes were established, which would be the right way to fulfil the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.
The official also mentioned the existence of many challenges to serve a more competitive and modern agriculture, in the various moments of the value chains, in the areas of research, extension, digitalization, industrialization and other scientific tools acquired in the universities
AfDB invests US$ 120 million in the value chain in Cabinda Province
The African Development Bank (AfDB) is investing around US$ 120 million in the value chain in Cabinda Province, said Pietro Toigo, the institution’s representative in Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe.
The project, whose implementation is around 20%, will be interesting because, despite Cabinda being very focused on oil production, it has a lot of potential for export, such as wood, in important markets such as the DRC, in addition to contributing to the solution of the domestic imports.
On the other hand, the official informed that another investment that is being made is around 100 million dollars, with the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESCTI), to leverage technological research in the country and facilitate access of women to science, technology and mathematics studies.
In this way, Pietro Toigo continued saying that there is another investment of 20 million dollars which is being worked with the Ministry of Economy and Planning (MEP) and focused on Agriprodesi with a focus on support for small and medium-sized companies.
Pietro Toigo, who was speaking at the workshop on the “The Higher Education Institutions Role for the Development of Agribusiness”, acknowledged that there is an important work done by the Angolan Government to diversify the economy, with an impulse to increase the different, less dependent development model of oil.
“It is a long and complicated journey. We are heading in the right direction, but it started and happened at a time of great difficulty, great shocks in the global economy. We are talking about the drop in oil costs, Covid-19 and now the crisis of the global economy and the war in Europe”, said the official.
Pietro Toigo highlighted the existence of investment in the agricultural sector that must be connected with targeted investment in human capital, technology and research to increase the productivity of the agricultural sector.
