Luchipu Foundation for Food, Energy and Water Sustainability (LIFEWS) has introduced Agrishine school initiative to promote climate literacy by focusing on growing food in schools across the country.
The Founder of LIFEWS, Mr Gabriel Ayayia, said this on Thursday during train the trainer training programme, hosted by FCT Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI) in Abuja.
According to him, the Agrishine school initiative is an initiative that will help the schools, the school kids to rethink how we grow food.
“We are in a difficult moment where we are confronted with the problem of climate change. So, how can we help the kids, the children, to adapt to the threat of climate change? They are most vulnerable people affected by climate change.
“So, the Agrishine school initiative is basically to promote climate literacy, focusing on growing food more smartly.
“This is imperative because if we want to think about addressing the problem of food insecurity, energy poverty and water crisis, then we need a climate literacy initiative,’’ LIFEWS founder said.
According to him, this initiative will help the kids to think about how they can grow food more smartly and then live more sustainably as they grow into the future that is unknown to them.
“We need to prepare these kids for the future so that the future will not just be a shock to them.
“So, what LIFEWS Foundation is trying to do in Nigeria and Africa is to concentrate and prepare them for what lies ahead, helping them to build what we call livelihood resilience and adaptive capacity to cope with what lies ahead.
“And that is about intergenerational ethics, which is about taking care of, making sure that we put into consideration the unborn kids into the framework of what we are doing today.
Ayayia added that the initiative was to promote that objective by catching them young as they grow into the future.
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According to him, they should not grow into more difficult future, they should grow into a future that will give them more clean energy, give them more access to food.
“And for them to do that, they should know how to grow food. And the basic tool to use is education. So, we are leveraging this education on technology. You know, we are in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“We aim to help these kids by leveraging on what they have been taught in school? And they are bringing climate-smart agriculture into the classroom, rethinking how we grow food.
“So, this Agrishine initiative is to awaken the consciousness of climate-smart agriculture.
“We are at the stage where we have to look beyond the traditional way of farming. We have to start thinking about climate-smart farming practises. That is one of the ways to secure the unknown future.”
He said that the foundation also needs the institutional support to build demonstration models in all the schools across the country.
“Our plan is to build demonstration models in all the schools across Nigeria. We have the expertise, we have the skills, we have the books that have been made available.
“We are working on the books that align with the school curriculum. So, what we need is the support from the government, so that every school in Nigeria will no longer become a classroom that is just based on theory.
“We want to marry theory with practice, as an attempt to address the interrelated problems of food insecurity, energy poverty, and water crisis.”
The LIFEWS founder emphasised the need for teachers to have an open mindset and pass the innovation to their students.
According to him, this technology is new, but it is not new in the world. It is been done in many countries in the world, but Nigeria is the giant of Africa.
“And my effort, before I came to Nigeria, to promote this technology, is that Nigeria should be at the forefront of this technology.
“This technology was tested in 2021 in Kenya, but Nigeria has all the infrastructure, all the capacity to be the leader in using this technology. So, our expectation would be that the teachers should be open to change.
“Change is the only constant in the world. We are in the era where the traditional way of farming is no longer sustainable. We are in the era where we are talking about agroecology, agro-routine and integrated way of farming.
“We cannot be parochial or be stagnated with our mindsets if we are not open to this change. So, what we expect the teachers to do is to work with us.
“We are bringing the curriculum to them, but we cannot do it alone. And that’s why everything we are doing is founded on our philosophy called Luchipu, that is, we need to do it together.
“Every student should be able to grow his or her own food, no matter how small it is. Nothing stops a student to be able to grow a tomato using a water bottle or using a pot,”Ayayia said.
Also, the Coordinating Director of DSTI, Mr Kolawole Olobasola, lauded the agrishine technology initiated by the foundation.
Olobasola said, I encourage the foundation very well because this is a technology age. And the foundation’s purpose is to study the relationship between the sun and the soil, which have given us setback.
“In Nigeria, you see a whole maize with only one step, but in some other countries, you see one stick of maize with five or six. What is the problem? What is happening?
“With this, the student will be aware and take consciousness. And not only the student. I also recommend it to other stakeholders in the farm such as crops producers.
“How do we encourage our plants? And how do we have maximum yield from some of these crops?
“So, the programme is to reinforce the conception of the students in agric, and to wake them up technologically”.