Discourse with Prof. Akinbile

NTA Close Flow with Toheeb Azeez: Planning for a New Future - Can Agriculture become Nigeria's new Oil.

Our Founder & CEO, Toheeb Azeez was on NTA 2 Lagos on the Close Flow show to discuss Agritech & Youth Employment.

The Nigerian Youth population is going to reach 70 million by 2030.

It would form over 26% of a 260 million projected Nigerian population in that year.

Currently, there are 13 million unemployed youths of the nation.
This figure could even climb higher with an envisaged bigger Nigerian and youth populations.
Youth unemployment costs Nigeria $10 billion economic loss yearly.

Agriculture could gainfully employ this number of unemployed youths and 7 million more (according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation).

It already employs 35% of the nation’s workforce, provides livelihood for vast majority of the rural inhabitants, the rural youths inclusive.

However, agriculture in the nation is still largely being practiced in a traditional, boring and unproductive way, that impedes the opportunities in the sector and discourages youth participation.
Technology enhances processes that yields better outcomes, and enables value chain development, which creates enticing opportunities for youth participation.

Other than get dirty and tired working the soil with hoes and cutlasses, youth rather farm with tractor and other advance tools, incorporate data, AI, robotics, IoTs, cloud computing, blockchain and distributed ledgers, and biotechnology, e.t.c. for digitial, precision and smart agriculture, efficiently utilizing inputs to generate greater results.

This way, jobs are not only created for the youths but entrepreneurship is sparked in them where they create solutions and employ more people. ThriveAgric, Precision Field Academy and Releaf Earth (YC W19) are good examples.

Nigeria has an aging farming population and her total population would reach 400 million in 25 years.

Youth participation complementing and replacing agricultural skill and workforce -and with their savviness and creative ability with -and technology in agriculture can help meet this future food needs.

Estimating Nigerian proportion of African agritech against a $100bn future estimate of agritech contritubtions to African agriculture market, agritech could inject $24bn yearly into the Nigeria agriculture market, when properly harnessed.

This is why agritech is important to the Nigerian economy but, however, is being held back by constraints -for instance, finance, infrastructure, skill gap, policy, etc.

Even when the Nigeria Agritech constitutes 25% of the total African agritech funding, the latter is just less than 2% of a $16bn global Agritech funding, and agritech represents just 4.8% of Nigeria’s tech startups.

Works are are being done by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation & Digital Economy, with policies (Agriculture Promotion Policy, National AI Strategy), 3MTT Nigeria and even private bodies to build critical infrastructure and talents to spur agritech and achieves 85% digital farming.
However, there’s is need for more and rapid work.