Part of TOHFAN’s plan for farm mechanization in Nigeria is to provide avenues of employment. With the rapid rise in Nigeria’s workforce, and the inability of white collar job creators to keep pace with this increase,
Part of TOHFAN’s plan for farm mechanization in Nigeria is to provide avenues of employment. With the rapid rise in Nigeria’s workforce, and the inability of white collar job creators to keep pace with this increase,
In 2003 when TOHFAN was established, the Hiring and Booking agents system was also put in place. This is one of the very important indices in the tractor hiring value chain. In the past, it was seen that most of the tractor hiring organizations had failed due to the lack of Hiring and booking agents system in their value chain. These Hiring and Booking agents were to serve as the middle men to build an effective and sustainable relationship between the farmers and Tractor owners. However, with this system in place, TOHFAN had difficulty in meeting up with demands because the B&H agents aggregated a large number of smallholder farmers who needed TOHFAN’s services, also, there was no record of this aggregation.
How Does the Booking and Hiring System Work?
The Booking and Hiring agents are aggregators, they source for farmers, get their name, phone number, the kind of services they require from TOHFAN and other necessary information. With the information they get, decisions are made. The booking agent as an aggregator makes 10 percent commission of whatever the tractor had generated.
The hiring agent on the other hand is a daily investor. He or she invests from 8am to 5pm, which covers the period when the tractor renders necessary services. The hiring agent invests as much as N62,000, this covers cost for the tractor and is broken down as ; N35,000 upfront payment, N10,000 for fuel, N3,000 for servicing the tractor, N3,000 for minor repairs, N4,000 for transporting the tractor from one location to the other and then N7,000 as payment for the operator. At the end of the day the hiring agent makes as much as N12,500 profit from hiring a tractor to a particular customer.
Identification, Recruitment and Training
In order to combat this challenge, in January 2018 TOHFAN and Propcom Mai-Karfi (PM) set up a system whereby the records of farmers TOHFAN works with and the kind of services rendered. This information is to be recorded for easy access and management.
The plan was for TOHFAN and PM to source for and identify active farmer’s group within eight states (Kano, Kaduna, Gombe, Yobe Jigawa, Nassarawa, Bauchi, Taraba, Adamawa) and introduce the booking and hiring agents strategy to them. This is aimed at reducing the stress associated with tractor hiring and other farm mechanization services rendered by TOHFAN. The goal is to get a clear acceptance of the strategy from farmers at the community level as well as the Booking/Hiring agents that will represent TOHFAN services in these areas. TOHFAN and PM carried out a selection process to pick a total 170 Booking and Hiring agents from all the target states(Bauchi =30 agents, Gombe =30, Taraba =10, Adamawa =20, Yobe=20, Jigawa= 30, Kaduna =10, and Kano= 20agents). Between the period of May 2018 to June 2018, Propcom Mai Karfi trained 130 booking and hiring agents for TOHFAN. In order to ensure gender balance and outreach to women, a total of 19 women were among the recruited and trained agents.
These agents were trained on negation, outreach and communication, financial analsyis and best practices to succeed, tractor hiring value chain etc
