Lagos selects 200 participants for nationwide home farming competition

The Office of the First Lady of Lagos State has finalised the selection of 200 participants to partake in the nationwide farming competition for female first-time farmers.

The scheme, tagged “Every Home A Garden” competition under the Renewed Hope Initiative of the First Lady of Nigeria, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, is set to have the winner bagging a N20 million prize.

The First Lady of Lagos State, Dr. Ibijoke Sanwo-Olu, at the press conference and seminar organised for the selected Lagos participants at the State House, Ikeja, on Thursday, said the state would deploy all resources to ensure the winner of the prize at the end of the cultivation exercise (August – December) emerge from Lagos.

The first lady expressed confidence Lagos would emerge victorious among the competitors, saying, “We are being prepared like a boy scout for this competition, and we know we are going to emerge victorious.”

“The decision of our office to limit the number of participants from Lagos State to 200 is for ease of coordination,” she explained, mentioning that the age category for selection was between five and 70 years.

“The “Every Home, A Garden” competition will culminate in December this year, when the final winner from all 36 states of the country will be announced,” she said.

She added that since the announcement of the competition, Lagos State has taken deliberate steps to ensure due process is followed in line with the competition’s criteria.

The Lagos first lady said, while the goal of the state “is to produce the overall winner of this competition in December, we are also focused on establishing a template that will serve as a reference point for future competitions.”

“To ensure the integrity of our process, we required participants to provide their Lagos State Residents Registration Agency numbers. This helped us verify that applicants who submit videos of their gardens to the Office of the First Lady of Nigeria through our Office are indeed residents of Lagos State,” she said.

Sanwo-Olu disclosed that the 200 participants were selected from a total of 1,052 applications after a thorough scrutiny.