By Chinedu Adonu

The Enugu State government, through the Ministry of Agriculture and Agro-Industrialisation, Thursday kicked off a-two day capacity building for extension agents, lead farmers and relevant staff of the ministry on computer appreciation, digital record keeping and Microsoft office.

This is to train farmers and extension workers on the modern way of information gathering and dissemination aimed at improving productivity among farmers and save man hours of doing things manually.

Flagging off the training which took place at Enugu State Tech-hub office at Independence Layout, Enugu, Commissioner for Agriculture and Agro-Industrialisation, Hon. Patrick Ubru, said they were trying to key into the e-governance programme of Gov. Peter Mbah which aims at shifting emphasis from manual way of doing things to digital way.

Ubru said that time had changed and that people were now moving with the trend instead of getting stuck or moving back to Egypt, the manual way.

He urged the participants to take their training serious to improve on new technological way in agriculture, pointing out that it is not late to learn.

“Time has changed. Please learn this because it will help you. You don’t feel too old to learn. You learn irrespective of your age,” he urged

He said that when the idea of organizing the training was muted to the governor, he quickly approved it so that farmers would get abreast with the digital way of farming before this year’s farming season commenced.

Explaining the essence of the training, the Head of Planning, Research and Statistics, Ministry of Agriculture and Agro-Industrialisation, Mrs Madueke Chidinma Emmanuella, also said that the training was to prepare the farmers and the staff to key into the e-governance programme of the governor which in the long run would increase agro production .

Emmanuella said that with the training, the participants could easily procure data and be able to disseminate them easily. “For every data we ask of them, it should be sent in Excel sheet, in a Microsoft word and in a digital form so that we can have data we can store and refer back to in years to come.”

She also explained that extension agents would also know that information can be got digitally instead of the manual they are used to.

On his part, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry, Mr. Victor Ngwu said they organized the training because they are in the business of collecting of analysis of so many information and data “because manual collection of data is slow.”