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Nigerian farmers and prospective entrepreneurs hoping to leverage technology to build their agriculture business now have a viable partner in the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) as the agency formally launched its platform: Smart Agro Business to connect investors in the agro business.
The Smart Agro Platform comprises of farmers, government agencies, agric experts, banks and micro-lenders, extension services, hardware solution providers, software developers, customers, marketplace, and other stakeholders across the agric value chain. It was formally launched at the recent eNigeria Dinner and Awards night in Abuja.
“This project was conceived in order to support Honourable Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr Dr Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami’s focus especially in making his dream reality towards turning the country into digital-driving economy and ensure the attainment of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which is end hunger and achieve good security by 2030,” said Director General of the NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi.
“What we did is to rethink agriculture differently, by creating a digital platform that will connect the Agric ecosystem and enable the possibility of new business models by the private sector which will, in turn, generate new products and services and create value across the Agric value chain,” added Abdullahi while presenting cheques and laptop-tablets to farmers who were trained on NITDA’s Smart Agric Platform at the eNigeria Dinner and Awards night.
He described the new smart agro platform as the dawn of a transformation in the agriculture sector to enable farmers contribute effectively to the digital economy of Nigeria and create jobs for thousands of young Nigerians.
Abdullahi explained that “NITDA Adopted Village for Smart Agriculture (NAVSA) is a project conceived to create about six million jobs in the next five to 10 years through the technology platform.
NITDA’s desk officer at the department of e-Government Development and Regulation Lukman Lamid further explained that “the idea is to support 25 graduates in each of the 774 LGAs on modern agric methods, give them the resources and the right technology to enable them to manage their farms from planting to harvesting and marketing.
“This pilot phase is a proof of concept which had witnessed selection, training and support of 15 graduates in Gombe state on modern farming methods in collaboration with National Agriculture Extension and Research Liaison Services (NAERLS).
“We have developed a digital platform in which its mobile app components will continue to serve NITDA supported farmers, any other farmer and all the ecosystem members when it is fully ready.”
Lamid noted that ability to get information to monitor farms in real-time and connect with resources to manage farm effectively will improve crop yield, quality of farm produce per block of land and profit for these farmers.
He said: “In the future, we would deploy and integrate smart technologies such as IoT on the platform to improve the accuracy and the processes of getting information in real-time, integrate with GIS technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Big data analytics among other emerging technologies to add more value to the platform.
The NITDA’s desk officer revealed that the innovation is a product of research paper “Towards Diversification of Nigeria Economy through Smart Agriculture” published by the Minister in June 2017 in International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology Research.
