USAID reaches 2m farmers with $16.8m investment in Nigeria’s agriculture

A total of 2,021,468 farmers were reached with inputs and services under the Feed The Future, Agricultural Extension and Advisory Services, USAID has revealed.

The ‘Feed the Future’ project is a USAID/PIND 16.8 million dollars funded 5 -year development initiative, that works with micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to facilitate learning, replication and scale around alternate models of extension services, to increase access and adoption of improved Agricultural technologies.

Presenting an overview of the project which is already in its fourth year, the USAID FTF team revealed that the project was targeted at 2 million smallholder producers in Benue, Cross River, Delta, Ebonyi, Kaduna, Kebbi and Niger States respectively is focused on five food value chains including maize, rice, cowpea, soybean and aquaculture.

The project has identified and promoted 39 most impactful practices(MIPs) as key extension innovation business solutions that MSMEs need to reach smallholder farmers to enhance their capacity. It works with 311 MSMEs who commercialise the MIPS and incorporate extension messaging to reach more farmers, enhance the volume of transactions and grow their business, the team noted.

Through this process, the 311 MSMEs were able to provide inputs and extension services on most impactful practices /improved Agricultural practices to 2,021,468 smallholder farmers and increased productivity and income of the farmers by 100%.

“About 70% of the improved agricultural practices are climate smart to help farmers adapt or build resilience to climate change, while a total of 1,088 gainful jobs were created by the MSMEs mainly youths to cope with increasing demand for agricultural inputs and extension by the expanding number of farmers in their business network,” USAID team in charge of the Feed the Future programme said.

In his remarks, Jean Pierre-Rousseau, director of business development, Winrock International and the project director for the USAID Feed the Future Agricultural Extension and Advisory Services activity said “Today we have 311 MSME units serving as change capitalists by bringing innovation, information, and productivity-enhancing inputs and services to the doorstep of two million smaller governments.”

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“The smallholder farmers have been able to access affordable financing to invest in increasing their productivity, their incomes have increased, and now they’re able to invest in securing their futures. Entrepreneurship, ingenuity, and innovation coming from those MSMEs has demonstrated that private sector extension services delivered to MSME units have a catalytic impact on food security.”

Rousseau said “This model represents the future of extension services in Nigeria, and it is now time for a national scale. What USAID Feed the Future and the Federal Department of Agriculture Extension introduced in memory, cost labour, natural, Ebonyi Delta, Kebbi, and Kaduna states, does not and should not stop there.”

He added that “Farmers are critical stakeholders, in ensuring that Nigeria can achieve food security and food self-sufficiency. It’s ensuring that every Nigerian has adequate food to eat their nutritional needs. Now this is the vision of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security. And it is one that we, as USAID, Fees the future project of working with the Ministry to obtain. And this is why the expansion is so important.

“Together with our partners and the Federal Department of Agriculture Extension, we have harnessed the power of Nigeria’s remarkable spirit of entrepreneurship to transform extension services, to deliver to farmers, to services they need to increase their productivity and contribute to the nation’s food security.

“Most importantly, this workshop is about bringing stakeholders together from federal and state governments, research, private sector, and donor-funded initiatives to identify the pathways and partnerships to play with the models that we have introduced and create and scale in our seven states to the nation.”

He added that Nigeria cannot achieve the vision of food security and food self-sufficiency by working with silos.

Also speaking, Deola Lordbanjour, director of, the Federal Department of Agricultural Extension Service, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, represented by Ayodele OLawumi said the USAID Feed The Future Activity, which has been on for over four years has filled a big vacuum that we have in national agricultural extension system.

He recalled that agricultural extension had worked successfully in Nigeria in the days of World Bank funding propelled by the public extension system, particularly agricultural development. And in that time, the national agricultural extension system was able to support food security and ensure that the activities they filled brought so much passion in agriculture all over.”

“When the funds of the World Bank dried up and the structure then became comatose, we had the government institute, the Federal Government of Agriculture Extension, in 2012, as a way to coordinate the national extension system,” Lordbanjour said.