NEPC Moves to Strengthen Value Chains for Northwest Non-Oil Exports
The Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) has reiterated its commitment to strengthening value addition and expanding the value chains of non-oil export products, particularly agricultural commodities and solid minerals, across the Northwest.
The Northwest Regional Coordinator of NEPC, Hajiya Amina Abdulmalik, stated this at a meeting with members of the State Committees on Export Promotion (SCEP) from across the region in Kano State.
Abdulmalik said the meeting was convened to review and assess the activities of the states under the One State One Product (OSOP) initiative, with a view to strengthening the value-chain development model and improving the export potential of products in which the states have competitive and comparative advantages.
The OSOP initiative is a key component of NEPC’s strategy for diversifying Nigeria’s economy away from oil by identifying strategic products or services that each state has the capacity to produce competitively for domestic and international markets.
According to the NEPC, the initiative is designed to harness the unique economic strengths of individual states and provide technical support, capacity building and market-access facilitation to help position selected products for global competitiveness.
The Council has also explained that OSOP is not limited to the production of raw commodities, but is intended to encourage development along the entire value chain, including processing, packaging, certification, quality improvement, market development and export.
Hajiya Amina said the review was therefore necessary to determine the progress made by the states, identify gaps and challenges, strengthen partnerships and develop practical recommendations for improving the production and export readiness of their priority products.
“It is believed that each state in the Northwest has particular products or resources in which it has comparative advantage over other states in the region. That is the main idea behind OSOP.
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“Each state has its peculiar products, and we want to evaluate and assess what they have been doing to expand the value chain over the last three years,” she said.
The State Committees on Export Promotion, on the other hand, serve as an important link between NEPC and state governments in taking export promotion activities to the grassroots. Its activities involve bringing together relevant government agencies, private-sector operators and other stakeholders to identify export opportunities, address bottlenecks and support implementation of export-promotion programmes within individual states.
During the technical presentation session at the Kano meeting, state coordinators and SCEP chairmen presented reports on activities surrounding their respective priority products and resources, highlighting achievements, challenges and recommendations for improving their export value chains.
The participants noted that the committees had sustained regular meetings and collaboration with NEPC and other relevant stakeholders in implementing export-promotion programmes across the states.
However, they identified inadequate funding and limited public awareness of export opportunities, procedures and requirements as some of the major challenges affecting the effective implementation of the initiative.
Following the presentations, Abdullahi assured participants that NEPC would work with the relevant stakeholders to address the identified challenges and strengthen the production, processing, promotion and marketing of products peculiar to each state.
“Now that we have listened to their challenges, we will put efforts into surmounting them to ensure the production, processing and promotion of these products, increase their value chains and achieve our export targets,” she said.
The renewed focus on OSOP and SCEP is expected to deepen collaboration between NEPC and state governments while encouraging states to take greater ownership of their export development agenda.
NEPC, which is the Federal Government’s apex institution for the promotion, development and diversification of exports, says its broader mission is to expand non-oil exports as a means of supporting sustainable and inclusive economic growth.
By PRNigeria
