Livelihood Improvement Family Enterprises Project

The oil palm tree belongs to the family of Arecaceae and the genus of Elaeis. Oil palm is grown in about 28 states in Nigeria. However, it is most widely grown in the southern states of the country.
In the LIFE-ND project, only two states which are Delta and Abia states are the states practicing oil palm processing as an enterprise. The project has impacted the lives of its beneficiaries in oil palm processing,

Success Story

Ekam Faith Eberechukwu from Ute-Okpu community in Ika South LGA, Delta State. She is 35 years of age, still lives with my mum. Upon the demise of her father when in JSS 3, it has been challenging for my mum, my siblings and me. We have a small oil palm plantation and we usually harvest and sell the Fresh Fruit known as banga locally, to make ends meet. I had little to no knowledge of how profitable oil processing is until LIFE-ND.

She learnt a lot about oil palm processing when to process, when and how to store and marketing. She learnt that in oil palm, nothing is wasted, the palm trees are used for making local broom, and the fresh fruit bunches FFB, after processing have a kernel inside which can be cracked and processed to palm kernel oil. The fibre which housed the FFB can be used as fire, which saves us from buying wood. And the kernel shell is used in making feeder roads.

I started my enterprise in oil processing thanks to LIFE-ND for providing me with a working capital of 577,375.00 naira. I was able to rent 1 hectare of palm plantation for 1 year. I started harvesting and processing in January 2022 and I made 680,000 naira in total, I'm glad to be part of this exciting project. Because of how big the farm is, I was able to hire laborers in the community. With this alone, I can stand on my feet. I can now move out of my mother's house and rent a place for myself.