‘Phygital’ tech powered by public-private partnerships promises climate solutions for Nigerian agriculture

An attentive audience of ministry division directors and managers during the agCelerant inauguration.

An innovative technology that bridges digital approaches and physical interventions on farms and offers last-mile breakthrough capabilities in reaching every single project farmer with climate solutions has impressed the top leadership in Nigeria. The innovation program – agCelerant – is an advanced value chain orchestration that connects smallholders with credit, insurance, input and output markets and is the result of a partnership between CGIAR institutes and a private organization.

The innovation program is leveraged by the Internet-of-Things (IoT), Earth Observation and Artificial Intelligence. It is powered by youth franchisees who can proximally and economically monitor and advise every single smallholder field under contract. agCelerant provides all value chain stakeholders with (i) agricultural investment risk mapping, to reduce lenders cash-out and increase availability of credit to smallholders, (ii) more robust, affordable insurance contracts to reduce persistent climate risk in intensifying crop-livestock systems and (iii) improved management of crop nutrient deficiencies to increase fertilizer use efficiency and agricultural productivity.

As the lead agricultural research institution standing on the national agCelerant committee, ICRISAT will advise in the development of new technical solutions inside the ecosystem, such as advanced yield forecasting, post-harvest loss predictions, or hybrid insurance products and to support the deployment targeting and leveraging of other useful scientific knowledge, e.g. for the structuration of agCelerant digital seed value chains.

The program was developed by Manobi Africa PLC with technical support from ICRISAT, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) and the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (NADiRA–Nurturing Africa’s Digital Revolution for Agriculture http://nadira-project.eu/).

Original article published on the CCAFS news blog