Nigeria Launch

In April 2025, PxD traveled to Abuja to launch a new program in Nigeria in partnership with the Agro Climatic Resilience in Semi-Arid Landscapes (ACReSAL) project. This initiative is funded by the World Bank in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, the Federal Ministry of Environment, and the Federal Ministry of Water Resources and Sanitation. The PxD team spent the last week of April in Abuja to kick off this exciting initiative by conducting a series of consultations with government Ministries, the World Bank, the Nigeria Meteorological Agency, the National Information Technology Development Agency, and other partners. 

With a population of over 220 million, Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country. According to the FAO, more than 70% of Nigerians rely on agriculture for their livelihoods – mostly through subsistence farming.

In northern Nigeria, smallholder farmers face several critical inter-related challenges arising from climate change, desertification, land degradation, declining agricultural productivity, a growing population, and violent conflict. These factors combine to make farmers in the region among the most vulnerable in the world, facing the triple threats of extreme poverty, food insecurity, and climate risk. The ACReSAL project aims to tackle these issues by investing in both community-level and individual-level solutions to promote climate-resilient agriculture across northern Nigeria. We are thrilled to be supporting the Government of Nigeria in this critical effort.

Through the ACReSAL project, PxD will work with the FMAFS, FMoE, and FMWR&S to build a Digital Precision Agricultural Extension (DPAE) platform. This platform will provide last-mile delivery of real-time, personalized agricultural advice to farmers in northern Nigeria based on their location, crops, and other specific needs—with the goal of improving productivity, incomes, and climate resilience.

We will pilot this platform with farmers in northern Nigeria and eventually transition it to the Nigerian government for long-term ownership and sustainability. Over time, we plan to incorporate a wide range of information into this platform, including weather forecasts, pest and disease outbreaks, soil health data, flood alerts, market updates, and more. This advice will be further enhanced using PxD’s AI-driven agricultural recommendation engine.

In addition, we hope to partner with the World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) leading the evaluation of the platform’s impact on the livelihoods of female farmers in the region.