Building a sustainable and enabling environment where businesses can thrive and at the same time encourage productivity is key to the growth and development of the agricultural sector. Building an enabling environment for the agricultural sector, all stakeholders need to fully understand the agricultural business environment; its challenges, its needs, the binding constraints, and the real solutions. In this sector, production is key and also a major ingredient of food security. The challenges of producers are different from aggregators and traders. Therefore, developing tailored strategies that would proffer solutions to the challenges of the various actors needs to be introduced.

Farmers do not need to be told what to do, they already know what to do, but they need to know the "how" to do it better to improve their productivity. Therefore, for the "how to do it better", we need to understand that technologies are good ways to improve productivity, however, we need to understand our reality and how best to introduce technologies in a gradual process. One of the major obstacles to the use of technologies among smallholders is the level of literacy, which has been on the decline over the years. To ensure that farmers embrace technologies faster, we need to develop a blueprint to increase literacy level in our rural communities and increase awareness. Education is beyond the four walls of the classroom, which includes the ability to be able to read and write and use simple and complex technologies in a changing World.

In conclusion, increasing literacy level is key to increasing adoption of technologies among the farmers, especially smallholder farmers. Therefore, the stakeholders must incorporate farmers' education into agricultural policies that aim to increase productivity for us to achieve food security.

Yours-in-Service,
Babatunde