Receiving the items, the Director, NAERLS, Professor, Mohammed Khalid Othman said the institute has been at the forefront of generating annual agricultural performance data for Nigeria in the past three decades.
Represented by the Deputy Director, Professor Emmanuel Ikani, he said with the improved data generation, capture and estimation tools coming with the ICT age, NAERLS sought for support in terms of facilities and staff capacity building towards a more reliable and accurate data collection from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and other bodies.
According to him, this support and collaboration came from FAO which is also giving NAERLS 200 tablets for digital data and a fully sponsored training for agricultural data generation and analysis using electronic platforms.
Professor Othman noted that, the training and presentation of the tablets is to reinforce the capacity of NAERLS and other partner data institutions in monitoring the growing season and assessing the crop/range production to end of security analysis.
The Director said, with these donations, NAERLS will take full advantage of remote-sensing products spatial dimension, which is essential in complementing ground observational data for monitoring and assessment purposes.
Earlier, the FAO representative in Nigeria, Mr. Nouroumacki Tall said, FAO remained focused and implemented the project to attain the results to the latter.
Represented by Dr. Rabe Mani, he said the project was to strengthen the capacity of SEMAs, NAERLS, National Program for Food Security (NPFS) and States Agricultural Development Programs (ADPs) in 16 northern states, especially in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states.
He said, “NAERLS is keeping pace with the technology as the server has been tested and is fully functional so that it will enhance efficient and effective field data collection”.
“FAO is now handing over 200 Android Tablets to NAERLS who can deploy 5 tablets per state ADPs ( plus FTC) with some extras to cater for possible breakdown”.
The country representative said with the cloud server and the tablets, NAERLS should be able to build a more technology-based field data collection system and enhance the skills of the ADPs staff to collect data more routinely and efficiently.