A familiar saying goes thus; “it is better to teach people how to fish than to give them fish continually,” which implies that helping people become self-reliant is better than assisting them with their short-term needs. This is the ideology behind the Lagos Food Bank Initiative’s sustainability program; Family Farming, which is geared towards providing means of livelihood for households living below the poverty line.

Primarily, food banks are renowned for addressing hunger and malnutrition, providing food for those in need of immediate assistance. Lagos Food Bank Initiative goes the extra mile to address poverty, which is one of the root causes of food insecurity and malnutrition, by training women and youth on urban backyard farming systems to grow vegetables, poultry and snails, for consumption and enterprise.

Through the Family Farming program, women and youth receive the necessary resources after  extensive practical training sessions to ensure they are set up for production of fresh farm produce. Start-up materials such as seedlings for vegetables, chicks, cages, chicken-feed and multivitamins for poultry, and snails, cages and soil for snail farming, are supplied to ensure a successful venture in agriculture.

The food bank also engages in monitoring and evaluation of the beneficiary farms to provide guidance on the best practices to ensure the highest level of production. This initiative provides beneficiaries of the program access to nutritious fresh farm products for consumption, and also improves their household income from the sales of their farm harvest.

In a country like Nigeria where the high level of unemployment and underemployment adversely affects women and youth, causing many households to struggle economically, the goal of the family farming program is to empower those affected to provide food for their direct and indirect families, making them self-reliant and ensuring long-term food security.

While providing food to those in need is something the Lagos Food Bank does regularly, the family farming program of the food bank is a sustainability initiative that seeks to elevate food insecure households and improve their living standards. This is remarkable!