IITA, PATS farms train bakers on cassava-based snacks

The workshop took place at the Women Development Centre, Abuja.The Managing Director, PATS Farms, Ope Faniran,  said the organisation is creating an alternative cassava utilisation to target communities by promoting a life-skills based development service. According to him, this will encourage entrepreneurship and stir interests in the use of high quality cassava flour.Faniran said: “We […]

The workshop took place at the Women Development Centre, Abuja.
The Managing Director, PATS Farms, Ope Faniran,  said the organisation is creating an alternative cassava utilisation to target communities by promoting a life-skills based development service.
According to him, this will encourage entrepreneurship and stir interests in the use of high quality cassava flour.
Faniran said: “We see Nigeria as an accident waiting to happen in the sense that there are so many young people out there- those who go to school and those who don’t go to school, without jobs to do.”
He said that IITA has developed over 30 recipes from cassava flour, which can create a lot of jobs for the youth.
Mrs. Lucy Samuel, a baker, said the skill acquisition on how to use cassava-based snacks will benefit her and other participants, adding that cassava flour will allow them to reduce their cost of production and make more money from the business.
She said learning how to use cassava flour to bake cake, bread, and other forms of bakery products made her understand the uses of cassava which, she noted, has gone beyond making gari and fufu.
Lucy lamented that only large scale bakers were benefiting from the federal government’s cassava bread intervention fund, adding that small-scale bakers like them were not getting any support from the government.