The creation of the Pilot Incubation Centre (CIP), Bonaberi, Douala, in 2010, food processing has improved significantly, with cassava and other processed foods such as nodules and flour.

Hence, about 20 workers are updating their skills in order to boost second-generation agriculture.

Aligned to this are 20 incubator workers whose skills are being updated to enhance the country’s food self-sufficiency and also create job opportunities.

With two experts from the India-based International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT, the skills enhancing session from March 3-6, 2015, christened “Incubator management and technology standardisation,” by the Cameroon Chamber of Commerce in Douala, is intended to help improve agriculture, especially the processing of cassava chips, cassava semolina (akwakwa), nodules and flour.

As concerns cassava, 1,040 metric tonnes have been processed since 2010, with 15 tonnes of cassava fibre (peelings) turned into butane gas.

The focus of the skill-enhancing session is on quality management systems and general principles of food hygiene.

Tefack Yves, CIP Chief, said participants will also learn product development and quality control with focus on cassava-based value added products, agribusiness incubation, hazards analysis and critical control point system and guidelines for application, as well as basics of business incubation.

The priority is to ensure food self-sufficiency in households and the entire nation, as well as ensure agricultural transformation in the country.

In this light, Cameroon has significant assets and varied potentials such as arable land, agro-ecological diversity and abundant rainfall. That is the key reason why development has been picked as the focus of second-generation agriculture and the foundations of which were laid by President Paul Biya at the Ebolowa Agro-pastoral Show in January 2011.