By Angeline Mgbele, Bureau Chief, Northern Nigeria
The Federal Government’s commitment to ensuring food security in Nigeria, through the infusion of emerging technologies in the agricultural sector , has necessitated the collaboration between the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) and the National Agriculture Development Fund (NADF) to sign a Memorandum of Understanding, (MoU) that aims to boost productivity in Agriculture.
According to a statement e-signed by the Director of Corporate Affairs and External Relations at NITDA, Hajia Hadiza Umar , NITDA’s Director-General, Mallam Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, revealed this last Thursday while receiving the NADF Executive Secretary, Muhammed Abu, and his team at the Agency Corporate Headquarter in Abuja, north central, Nigeria, for the signing of the MoU.
Mallam Abdullahi said “President Bola Ahmed Tinubu GCFR is big and loud on boosting agriculture to ensure food security and today you cannot talk about boosting agriculture without talking about digital technology. And that is the reason we are here to sign an MoU to see how we can infuse emerging technologies into Agriculture so we can boost productivity in Agriculture.”
Abdullahi said: “Our Minister is quite interested in this as he personally has his own farm where he is doing all these and he started the conversation with you, our teams worked to draft the MoU, both legal teams reviewed the document and today we are here to sign the MoU for immediate implementation.”
“We have started our initiatives around agriculture like the National Adopted Village for Smart Agriculture (NAVSA), we have a demo farm here in Abuja, and we have been partnering with Universities across the country doing research and Startups to develop technologies and do proof of concepts with the technologies on farmlands,” said Inuwa.
“This year, we gave grants to Startups who have ideas on how to use emerging technologies to boost agriculture. And we are working with some of them in existing farms across the country to demonstrate how technology can boost productivity in that space,” he added.
Speaking at the signing, the Executive Secretary of NADF, Mohammed Abu Ibrahim, remarked that the nexus between Agriculture and Technology could not be over emphasised, as the agricultural sector was facing some temporary challenges like the issues of funding, climate change, insecurity and many more.
Mr. Abu Ibrahim stated: “We have seen interesting technological patterns which have given a lot of impact and optimisation in our sector like AI, WAV, IoT and many more and we feel like without optimising agriculture and looking at it from this evidence-based perspective as a Fund we may not achieve much.
“There is no denying the fact that empirical evidence, especially data backed evidence, would help us to allocate our limited resources better. So, in our stride to see that we are doing a lot more with less we have decided to come in and especially be part of monitoring and evaluation which will eventually direct us towards achieving that mantra of ‘doing more with less’ and that is why we are here.”
He said the Fund was hopeful that this would be the first of many more of such collaborations.
