A TOTAL of 620 acres have been cultivated under Building a Better Tomorrow: Youth Initiative for Agribusiness (BBT-YIA) programme at Chinangali block farm in Dodona Region, it has been said.

Speaking at the farm yesterday, BBT-YIA acting national coordinator Michael Nyanga said the programme aims to enable youth to engage in agriculture and fight the employment crisis in the country.

He said this while addressing editors and reporters who visited the farm to witness progress made so far.

Nyanga said that the Chinangali block farm with 1,772 acres has 261 youth who have already started growing sunflowers in almost half of the acres.

“We have continued to clear the remaining acres and our goal is that by May this year we will have finished clearing the entire area of Chinangali bloc and hand it over to the youth,” he said.

He said that for the Chinangali area, they have focused on vegetable farming and that when they complete, each youth will be given five acres to continue farming and a title of the plot.

He said the production activities to be carried out by the youth will be managed by their cooperative called Chinangali BBT AMCOS Limited.

The coordinator said the government has built 38 houses for the youth who are also given free food for a period of six months until they harvest and sell their crops as well as a subsistence allowance of 150,000/- per month, adding that the government pays for their water and electricity bills.

He said the government will look for reliable markets for their produce every harvesting season.

“For example, the sunflower that is in the field already has a buyer waiting for it to be harvested and we will do the same for all the block farms in the country,” he said.

He said the programme expects to enable three million youth to employ themselves in the agriculture sector by 2030.

Nyanga said that one of the goals of the project is to increase production in agriculture and eliminate poverty by enabling youth to produce a huge amount of agricultural products.

He said that BBT-YIA is implemented in four projects which are large block farms where there are currently 2,000 acres across the country.

He said that the Ministry of Agriculture cooperates with an institution under the ministry called Agriculture Input Trust Fund which enables youth to get loans with a low interest rate of 4.5 percent.

He said that so far they have enabled 118 youth  to get loans of 950m/- and that another area where they are implementing the BBT-YIA is extension services where they enable those who have graduated from colleges to provide extension services to farmers in the country.

“In the area of extension services, we have started with 251 youth in collaboration with Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) who we have sent to provide extension services to cotton fields and currently these youth are providing services in 40 districts that grow cotton in the country,” he said.

He said another area of the project is to drill 65,000 wells targeting farmers with 2.5 acres where they are setting up irrigation infrastructure and alongside 5,000 litres water tank and they expect to reach 1,40,000 farmers by 2030.