The COVID-19 Action Recovery and Economic Stimulus (CARES), a Word Bank-assisted project, has expended about N1 billion on various programmes to enhance small-scale businesses and farming activities in Kano State.

The state programme coordinator of CARES, Rufa’i Halilu, disclosed this to journalists after inspecting projects executed in some local government areas of the state on Monday in Kura.

“We expended between N900 million and N1 billion on these components of the projects in the last six months that we started the programme,” he said.

Mr Halilu identified components of the project to include the provision of farm input and irrigation facilities, intervention for small businesses, and rehabilitation of feeder roads and toilets in rural markets.

He said people from 38 local government areas of the state benefited from the gesture.

The programme coordinator said the CARES project would provide assistance to poultry and small farmers and popcorn machines to youths in the remaining six metropolitan areas of the state in the next few weeks.

Mr Halilu said the project had spent not less than N300 million on farm inputs alone, while about 980 poor farmers so far had benefited.

“The amount was spent on power tillers, planters, insecticides, herbicides, fertilisers, solar powered-water pumping machines, and improved seeds, among others.’’

He said the farm inputs would enable the poor rural farmers to improve their agricultural productivity and achieve food security.

“The road rehabilitation was to provide access roads for easy transportation of the farm produce from the farms to homes and markets, while the intervention on toilets was to check open defecation,” he said. 

(NAN)