After harvesting of crops, it is mostly women that process the corps into food, and take them to sell at the market places. Women also always willingly and occupationally cook the food for their respective families and occasional guests. Many of these women are also food sellers in food stalls and food canteens in markets, villages, towns, and cities nationwide.
Apart from actively participating in general agricultural activities as afore-mentioned, women also process such crops as cassava, yam, beans, palm oil seedlings, rice, plantain, potatoes, palm wine, etc. upon harvest, from the various respective places of harvesting them in the farms, until they are consumed as food and drinks.
Apart from women helping their men folk to farm the afore-mentioned crops and other crops successfully for centuries and millennia, Nigerian women also specifically engaged and actively participated and succeeded in animal farming. These include assisting their men folk in cattle-rearing, milking and processing the milk derived from cattle especially, into different varieties of milk and milk products, including butter and other products. Apart from the meat and milk derived from cattle and other farm and domesticated animals like sheep and goat, other products, such as edible and otherwise usable animal skins, butter and edible oil are also derivable from these farm animals.
In Northern Nigeria and beyond, cattle rearing especially, is the sole occupation of the Fulani herdsmen and cattle rearers for centuries and millennia.
Other animal farming activities actively engaged in by Nigeria women nationwide, apart from tending to the cattle, also include fisheries and poultry, as well as rearing of goats and sheep, and other domesticated small farm animals.
From the foregoing it can be seen that the role importance, relevance and contribution of women in agriculture in Nigeria and Africa as a whole in general from time immemorial and continuously, can never be overemphasized.
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