Agriculture & Agribusiness

Nigeria loses a substantial share of what it grows between the farm and the market, and in the North-West the losses concentrate in a handful of predictable places: tomatoes and peppers that sit in the open at an aggregation point for a day too long, grain that goes into store at the wrong moisture content, onions in a shed that has no ventilation, and produce that spends nine hours on a truck because nobody sequenced the collection route. None of these are exotic problems and none of them need exotic technology. They need measurement — of temperature, of moisture, of time in transit — and a record that somebody is accountable for reading.

Out-grower schemes have a different problem. A scheme may contract several thousand smallholders across dozens of communities, advancing seed, fertiliser and agrochemicals against an obligation to deliver produce at harvest. Where the register of participants lives in a field officer’s notebook, the same person appears twice under different spellings, plots are described by landmark rather than coordinate, and inputs are signed for by whoever is present. At harvest the scheme cannot say with confidence who was owed what or who defaulted. A biometric or phone-verified registry with geo-referenced plots turns an argument into a record.

Input subsidy programmes concentrate every one of these weaknesses. Public money buys fertiliser that must reach a named farmer at a named location within a season, through a distribution chain of agro-dealers with varying incentives. Leakage happens at redemption, where the same entitlement can be claimed more than once, and in the reconciliation between what was allocated, what was collected and what was actually delivered. Verified identity at redemption, geotagged and timestamped collection, and reconciliation against agro-dealer stock movement close most of the gap — provided the design assumes intermittent connectivity, because most redemption points have it.