My VoxDev Contribution on Agricultural Technology in Africa (Part I)
Why Nigeria's smallholders remain stuck: Seeds, credit, and missing data
Nigeria’s agricultural sector contributes approximately 23% of real GDP and utilises roughly 35–40% of the labour force, yet by almost every productivity measure the sector is underperforming its potential. Crop yields remain well below the global average, modern input use is low and spatially uneven, and food insecurity has increased over the past decade. As of early 2024, an estimated 26.5 million Nigerians were projected to face high levels of food insecurity; by the fourth quarter of that year, this had risen to approximately 31.8 million (Akpoghelie et al. 2024; UNICEF 2025). Food price inflation reached a 28-year high of 40% in April 2024, with food imports expanding by approximately 11% per annum; during this time, an additional 14 million Nigerians fell below the poverty line (African Union 2023; World Bank 2024). This is against a backdrop in which more than 133 million people are classified as living in extreme multidimensional poverty, rendering the costs of agricultural underperformance inseparable from the country’s broader development challenge.
Two structural features of the Nigerian context are essential for interpreting the evidence.