President John Dramani Mahama has assured the National Service Authority (NSA) of government’s commitment to help develop its Papao Poultry Farm into a Centre of Excellence.

The Centre, he said, would play a three-prong role of a producing farm, a training farm and a research farm.

The President gave the assurance on Friday, when he defied a heavy downpour to inspect the Authority’s Papao Poultry Farm in the Domekwabenya Constituency of the Greater Accra Region.

The project currently has a 100,000-bird capacity and currently has up to 70,000 birds.

“Today I decided to devote my afternoon to come and see the impressive work that the National Service Authority and the Ministry of Youth Development and Empowerment are doing in this Papao enclave,” he said.

President Mahama took the opportunity to congratulate the Minister and the staff of the National Service Authority for the very good work they had done. 

“This project is said to have a hundred thousand-bird capacity and so far the centre has up to 70,000 birds,” he said.

The President said the farm’s capacity of 100,000 birds was a very impressive number and that he was certain that soon the Authority would work out to full capacity to be able to produce to feed into the Ghanaian market.

 ”I promise to help you develop this poultry farm into a Centre of Excellence. It will be both a producing farm, it will also be a training farm, and it will be a research farm,” he stated.

The President said the Government would provide the farm with poultry processing plants, a hostel, vehicles and a solar power plant to boost electric supply.

“We will make this a model farm so that people will come from other West African countries to come and study what National Service personnel of Ghana and volunteers have done here in Papao,” he said.

President Mahama announced that next month, the government was going to launch the Nkokɔ nkitinkiti project.

He said the Project would have three layers: The first would be the large-scale producers, and that they were going to get about four million day-old chicks. 

The second, he said, would be the medium-scale producers and that they would get about three million day-old chicks.

Whereas the third would be the household producers, saying “Every household, every young entrepreneur who signs up, you identify your site, your chicken house and then we’ll give you the day-old chicks and we’ll also supply you with the feed”. 

He noted that the Government would also vaccinate the day-old chicks for them.

The President said that after the chickens were grown, the Government would come to farms and buy all the chickens from the farmers and give them their next set of day-old chicks. 

He said the Government was going to build processing plants in different parts of the country, adding that the first processing plant was going through procurement and once approved, construction would start.

The President reiterated that other parts of the country would also have processing plants. 

“So when we buy the chicks from you, we’ll take them to the processing plants. We’ll process the chickens and package them nicely with Nkokɔ Nkitinkiti brand on them,” he said.

“And then we’ll supply them directly to the supermarkets and to the cold store owners who sell chicken. This will help us to cut our huge poultry import bill. We should be able to produce enough poultry to feed the whole of Ghana.”

The President said: “Once the Nkokɔ nkitinkiti project takes off, we believe that in three years, we’ll be producing almost 100 per cent of the chicken that we eat in Ghana ourselves. So that we can stop bringing nkokɔfunu from outside.”

Madam Ruth Dela Seddoh, the Acting Director-General of NSA, said the Authority was committed to unlocking opportunities in agriculture, business, information technology and other untapped lucrative sectors. 

She said the goal was to ensure that every fresh graduate could earn a decent living to feed not only themselves but their entire families.