Nigeria has taken a decisive step toward ending its food security crisis by partnering with Morocco to build the country’s first national geospatial agricultural intelligence platform. The system will deliver real-time data on crop locations, farmland availability, yield forecasts and emerging food security threats across all 36 states. The agreement was formalised in Rabat on July 17 when Senator Ibrahim Hadejia, Deputy Chief of Staff to the President, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with OCP Africa and Ground Truth Analytics on behalf of Vice President Kashim Shettima.
The platform, named the National Agro-Productivity System, will be coordinated by the Presidential Food Systems Coordinating Unit under the National Agribusiness Policy Mechanism. It will equip federal, state and local governments with granular intelligence on agricultural land, crop performance, growth stages and projected yields. The system is designed to strengthen production planning, food security monitoring, agribusiness investment, early warning systems and evidence-based policy decisions. A six-month pilot will launch in three states before nationwide deployment, focusing on dataset calibration, ground-truthing and institutional capacity building.
The partnership arrives three years after President Bola Tinubu declared a state of emergency on food security in July 2023. Since then, Nigeria’s food inflation has exceeded 40 percent, driven by petrol subsidy removal, naira devaluation, persistent insecurity in food-producing regions and climate disruptions. The World Bank and UNICEF have warned that over 31.8 million Nigerian children under five are acutely malnourished, the second-highest burden globally after India. The crisis has exposed structural weaknesses in Nigeria’s agricultural data infrastructure, leaving planners unable to monitor production, anticipate shortfalls or target interventions effectively.
The Presidential Food Systems Coordinating Unit was established in July 2024 to address these gaps. Led by Marion Moon, Technical Assistant to the President on Agriculture, the unit has convened state governors, agricultural ministry officials and development partners around the National Agribusiness Policy Mechanism. The mechanism aligns federal and state interventions around shared priorities, including the deployment of state coordinators across 13 pilot states to gather intelligence on production patterns. Earlier this year, the unit reported that over 3,500 rice farmers abandoned cultivation due to cumulative losses estimated at N93 billion.
OCP Africa, the continental arm of Morocco’s OCP Group, is the world’s largest phosphate exporter and a major fertiliser manufacturer operating in 30 African countries. Ground Truth Analytics specialises in satellite-based crop monitoring and geospatial agricultural data, providing field-level insights across multiple African markets. The Nigerian delegation to Morocco included representatives from the Office of the Vice President, the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Justice, the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, the National Space Research and Development Agency and the National Agricultural Extension and Research Liaison Services.
The geospatial platform introduces a critical layer of transparency to Nigeria’s agricultural sector. For the first time, federal and state agencies will access a single, unified dataset on farmland distribution, crop health and yield projections. This intelligence will enable targeted interventions, such as directing fertiliser subsidies to high-potential zones or deploying extension services to areas with declining productivity. The system also addresses a long-standing institutional gap: the absence of a centralised database to track agricultural land use, which has hindered investment and policy coherence.
The partnership’s timing reveals a strategic shift in Nigeria’s approach to food security. Previous interventions focused on input subsidies and emergency food distribution, which provided short-term relief but failed to address systemic inefficiencies. The geospatial platform represents a move toward data-driven governance, where decisions are informed by real-time intelligence rather than political expediency. This shift aligns with the federal government’s broader digital transformation agenda, which seeks to leverage technology to improve service delivery across sectors.
The pilot phase’s focus on technology localisation underscores another critical dimension: institutional capacity building. The system’s success will depend on the ability of Nigerian agencies to interpret geospatial data and translate it into actionable policies. The partnership with Ground Truth Analytics includes training for local experts, ensuring that the platform’s deployment is accompanied by the skills needed to sustain it. This approach contrasts with past initiatives, where imported technologies were often abandoned due to a lack of local expertise or political will.
The Nigeria-Morocco partnership also signals a broader continental trend: the rise of South-South cooperation in agricultural innovation. Morocco’s OCP Group has emerged as a key player in Africa’s fertiliser market, while Ground Truth Analytics has deployed its satellite monitoring systems in countries like Kenya and Ethiopia. Nigeria’s adoption of this model reflects a growing recognition that food security challenges require regional solutions, particularly as climate change and population growth intensify pressure on agricultural systems. The platform’s success could position Nigeria as a hub for agricultural intelligence in West Africa, attracting investment and technical partnerships from other African nations.
