Our Partnership with the Central Bank of Nigeria to support over 25000 Local Nigerian farmers.
Agriculture is the largest sector of the Nigerian economy employing two-thirds of the entire labour force. One would expect that this sector would generate a lot of revenue for Nigeria but production hurdles along the value chain are significantly limiting the performance of the sector. This has resulted in food security challenges across the country. These questions and challenges are ones that we have been strategically placed to address seeing as we have over the last few years innovated along farmer challenges to help farmers drive increased profitability for their agricultural activities, better livelihoods for themselves and supporting families to better sustenance.
Our big question every time is one of “How do we innovate around more farmer challenges to improve their lives and drive increased value across the agricultural value chain”. This has been the heart of Thrive Agric. But what does scale mean for us? How do we ensure that we are consistently doing more for partners? It is by leveraging relationships with partners who share our vision to create an economically resilient Africa through Agriculture.
The Central Bank of Nigeria has been very intentional in its resolve to support local farmers. These efforts is in Nigeria’s bid to encouraging investment in agriculture to help diversify the economy away from oil, which accounts for more than 90% of export revenues. The central bank targets increasing output of major food and cash crops including cotton, rice, tomato, cassava, cocoa and maize.
The goal of this is to create a linkage between companies like Thrive Agric involved in supporting smallholder farmers to produce required key agricultural commodities, Maize in this case owing to a recent shortage in the production numbers to reach self sufficiency and reduce the country’s reliance on imports. The programme thrust is the provision of farm inputs to small holder farmers to boost production of Maize, stabilize inputs supply to agro processors and address the country’s negative balance of payments on food. This financially empowers smallholder farmers and engages them productively to boost agricultural production and non-oil exports in the face of unpredictable crude oil prices and its resultant effect on the revenue profile of Nigeria.
The broad objective of this partnership is to create economic opportunity for smallholder farmers by leveraging the deepened structures that Thrive Agric has in it’s operations to capture better value for the farmers with a view to increasing agricultural output and significantly improving capacity utilization of processors.
Other objectives for this partnership includes: Increase banks’ financing to the agricultural sector, reduce agricultural commodity importation and conserve external reserves, Increase capacity utilization of agricultural firms, Create new generation of farmers/entrepreneurs and employment, Deepen financial inclusion of local Nigerian Farmers through our increased networks to provide financial services to farmers and the farmer communities we operate in, Reduce the level of poverty among smallholder farmers, Assist rural smallholder farmers to grow from subsistence to commercial production levels.
Read our detailed process on How we make agriculture profitable and empower local Nigerian farmers.
To put the challenges Nigeria is facing in perspective, in the past 20 years, value-added per capita in agriculture has risen by less than 1 percent annually. This simply means that in the past 20 years, the contribution of Agriculture to the livelihoods of an average Nigerian is next to nothing.
FAO estimates that Nigeria has lost $10 billion in annual export opportunity cocoa, palm oil, maize, groundnut, and cotton alone because of a continuous decline in the production of those commodities. While the food production in the country is declining, the population growth is not slowing down, to sustain itself over the years, Nigeria has had to rely on food importation.
To make matters worse, the effects of the pandemic caused disruption in food security and it raised a lot of questions about food insecurity not only in Africa but the world. More than ever, initiatives like these are needed in the country right now seeing how the pandemic is affecting the Agriculture value chain and food systems in Nigeria.
We are excited about this partnership with the Central Bank of Nigeria. Partnerships are at the centre of everything we do at #ThriveAgric, and leveraging them to improve the lives of our farmers is why we do what we do, especially partnerships that are all about creating more value and building better livelihoods for local #farmers across Nigeria.
The goal of this initiative is to support over 25,000 farmers and cultivate over 25000 hectares of maize farmland across Nigeria and the end goal is to produce over 20 million metric tonnes of maize grains to boost maize production in Nigeria.
Nothing gives us so much joy to know that this will not only create better livelihoods for local farmers across Nigeria but it will also bridge the demand gap for maize and maize products in consumer markets across Nigeria.
So, how will we make this happen? For a few years now, we’ve been working on a software called the Thrive AOS, that allows us to reach more farmers across Nigeria. Our plan is to reach over 1million farmers over the next few years and we need technology to scale to that level. The technology allows us to keep a close eye on the farmers and ensure that they are on track with the projected yield, and typically be able to use technology to automate processes in a way to make our operations and that of the farmers transparent to stakeholders across the value chain.
We know that this partnership will go a long way in creating better livelihoods for farmers and also move Nigeria a step closer to food security. We are always on the look for partnerships like these that are tailored to ensuring food security and improving the livelihood of farmers.
A prosperous Africa begins with you, let’s do more for our Farmers. Visit thriveagric.com to get started. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and subscribe to our YouTube Channel to see our work improving the lives of local farmers in Nigeria and how we are building to ensure food security in Africa, one farmer at a time.
