The National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP) in collaboration with Friesland Campina (FC WAMCO) has trained 30 prospective dairy entrepreneurs in Nigeria.
In a statement made available to the News Agency of Nigeria on Monday in Abuja, NOTAP’s spokesperson, Raymond Ogbu, said the entrepreneurs were trained in Gombe on modern dairy development.
According to him, the 30 entrepreneurs were drawn from the North-East zone and they were trained on modern methods of dairy production.
Speaking at the event, the Director-General of NOTAP, Dr DanAzumi Ibrahim, said the training was borne out of the efforts of the office to popularise dairy entrepreneurship in Nigeria.
Ibrahim said, ”Nigeria was running a monolithic economy and for a country that aspires to be among the developed economies in the world, it needed to diversify her economy especially via agro-based sector.
“ This programme was borne out of the desire to increase local content in dairy products in Nigeria.
“ There are a lot of cows in Nigeria, but they yield a small quantity of milk due to poor and inadequate knowledge on the modern techniques of cow breeding and management.
“Vietnam and Netherlands, the highest producers of milk don’t have the number of cows Nigeria has but they embraced the global best practices in dairy development to ensure high milk yield.”
Ibrahim added that technology was what rules the world and for the production of enough milk, Nigeria dairy entrepreneurs must adopt the modern methods of breeding and milking of cows.
The D-G stated that in order to ensure technology transfer and global best practices in dairy production, NOTAP partnered with FC WAMCO on dairy development programmes in 2013.
He said the partnership has led to the establishment of milk collection centers in Ibadan, Oyo state.
According to Ibrahim, ”Nigeria has the potential to do well in dairy development if well managed.”
