The federal government has taken a major step towards modernising Nigeria’s agricultural sector by signing a landmark agreement to deploy an artificial intelligence and satellite-powered crop monitoring system that will provide real-time intelligence on farming activities across the country, with implementation beginning in 15 priority states.
The initiative, unveiled through a Memorandum of Understanding signed in Ben Guerir, Morocco, is expected to transform agricultural planning by enabling federal and state governments to monitor crop cultivation, land use, production trends and emerging food security threats using advanced geospatial technology.
The agreement was signed at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University by the Deputy Chief of Staff to the President (Office of the Vice President), Senator Ibrahim Hassan Hadejia, on behalf of the federal government, alongside Morocco’s OCP Africa and geospatial technology firm Ground Truth Analytics.
A statement issued by the Technical Assistant on Agriculture to the President in the Office of the Vice President, Marion Moon, said Hadejia represented Vice President Kashim Shettima, who chairs the Presidential Food Systems Coordinating Unit (PFSCU), at the signing ceremony.
According to the statement, the partnership formally launched Nigeria’s first satellite-powered National Agro-Productivity System (NAPS), an integrated platform designed to generate AI-driven intelligence on crop yields, land availability and food security risks nationwide.
Speaking during the ceremony, Hadejia said Nigeria must move beyond merely adopting emerging agricultural technologies to developing the expertise required to improve and customise them for local realities.
He said agriculture was increasingly being reshaped by artificial intelligence, precision farming, data analytics and geospatial technology, stressing that Nigeria must build indigenous capacity to harness such innovations in addressing national priorities.
According to him, the platform will strengthen seasonal planning, agricultural investment, productivity monitoring and policy coordination by supplying governments at all levels with timely and reliable information for evidence-based decision-making.
“Our ambition extends beyond deploying technology. We are building a Nigerian capability that is adapted to our environment, managed by our institutions, driven by local expertise and sustained through knowledge transfer and continuous learning,” he said.
Earlier, Moon explained that the National Agro-Productivity System was conceived to bridge the longstanding information gap between projected agricultural output and actual harvests.
She observed that inadequate monitoring during farming seasons had often resulted in poor planning and policy decisions, noting that governments frequently discovered only after harvest that production targets had not been achieved.
She said the technology would provide real-time visibility into what farmers are cultivating, allowing policymakers to make more accurate decisions on food reserves, imports and exports while aligning federal interventions with production realities at the subnational level.
Moon described the National Agribusiness Policy Mechanism, under which NAPS operates, as a four-pillar framework focusing on domestic production, strategic reserves, imports and exports to maintain a balanced national food system.
She disclosed that the mechanism, approved by the National Council on Agriculture and Food Security in November 2024, had already been piloted in 13 states across three planting seasons.
According to her, the pilot programme reached about 250,000 farmers, surveyed over 50,000, covered more than 2,000 communities, focused on five major commodities and generated over one million data points to support agricultural planning.
Chief Executive Officer of OCP Africa, Alafifi Laadel, described the agreement as a long-term partnership aimed at building institutional capacity rather than a conventional technology procurement arrangement.
She said the collaboration would enable Nigeria to develop local expertise capable of deploying, managing and continuously improving advanced agricultural technologies.
Chief Executive Officer of Ground Truth Analytics, Driss Kitane, demonstrated how artificial intelligence analyses satellite imagery to automatically identify individual farms, determine the crops planted and monitor their growth throughout the farming season.
Using a demonstration from Kano State, he said the system refreshes satellite images every five days, enabling continuous monitoring of agricultural activities on a national scale without manual field mapping.
Kitane revealed that the same technology currently predicts Morocco’s annual wheat production up to three months before harvest with between 90 and 95 per cent accuracy.
He added that financial institutions already use the platform to assess farmers’ creditworthiness, while agricultural cooperatives in Ghana rely on it to verify that beneficiaries cultivate the acreage declared when obtaining loans.
He assured Nigerian officials that all data generated under the programme would remain the sovereign property of Nigeria and would be hosted exclusively on servers located within the country.
According to him, implementation will commence with a minimum viable product covering one state before expanding to three states with comprehensive crop intelligence and land-cover mapping.
The final phase will deliver multi-season monitoring across 15 priority states.
President and Director-General of Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Hicham El Habti, welcomed the Nigerian delegation and noted the institution’s growing relationship with Nigeria, disclosing that Nigerians account for about 60 per cent of students enrolled in its medical school.
The agreement comes three years after President Bola Ahmed Tinubu declared a state of emergency on food security following economic reforms introduced in 2023, including the removal of petrol subsidy and exchange rate unification, which contributed to rising food prices.
Nigeria has since grappled with soaring food inflation, climate-related disruptions, flooding and insecurity across key agricultural regions, while weak agricultural data systems have limited the country’s ability to accurately forecast production and respond to emerging shortages.
The Nigerian delegation included officials from the Office of the Vice President, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, the Federal Ministry of Justice, the National Space Research and Development Agency, the Nigeria Governors’ Forum and other institutions supporting implementation of the National Agro-Productivity System.