Reported by: Ijeoma G | Edited by: Oravbiere Osayomore Promise.
The Federal Government on Friday, July 17, 2026, signed a landmark Memorandum of Understanding with Moroccan partners to deploy a satellite- and artificial intelligence-powered agricultural monitoring platform that will provide federal, state, and local governments with near real-time data on agricultural land, crop distribution, production performance, and emerging food security risks. The agreement, signed at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guerir, Morocco, marks the formal launch of Nigeria's first satellite-powered national crop-monitoring system, known as the National Agro-Productivity System (NAPS).
Senator Ibrahim Hassan Hadejia, Deputy Chief of Staff to the President in the Office of the Vice President, signed the agreement on behalf of the Federal Government, standing in for Vice President Kashim Shettima, who chairs the Presidential Food Systems Coordinating Unit (PFSCU). The partners include Morocco's phosphate group OCP Africa and geospatial technology firm Ground Truth Analytics. The system will be deployed in phases across 15 priority states before wider expansion.
Senator Hadejia framed the initiative as part of a broader push to build domestic technological capacity. "The problems we face should not define the limits of our ambition. They should inspire us to develop the technologies, institutions, and capabilities required to overcome them," he said. He stressed that Nigeria must build the capability not only to adopt innovations but also to adapt them to its own context. "Our ambition goes beyond the deployment of technology. We seek to build a Nigerian capability that is adapted to our conditions, understood and managed by our institutions, supported by Nigerian expertise, and sustained through knowledge transfer, institutional capacity development, and continuous learning," Hadejia added.
Marion Moon, Technical Assistant on Agriculture to the President and Executive Secretary of the PFSCU, described NAPS as the government's response to a persistent information gap between what farmers declare they will produce and what actually emerges from the field. "Monitoring during the season has been our biggest weakness. We reach the end of a season and find we did not hit the targets we saw at the beginning," she said. Moon explained that this misalignment undermines sound national policy because production decisions are taken locally while trade policy is decided at the federal level. "If a farmer said they were going to plant maize, did they actually plant maize, or did they switch back to rice?" she asked. "If we believed everyone was leaving rice and opened our reserves accordingly, only to discover they planted rice after all, we end up with a surplus".
The platform, which operates within the National Agribusiness Policy Mechanism approved by the National Council on Agriculture and Food Security in November 2024, has already been piloted across 13 states through three planting seasons, reaching about 250,000 farmers and collecting over one million agricultural data points. Phase One of the initiative will comprise a six-month pilot across three states, focusing on localisation of the technology through dataset calibration, ground-truthing, and national capacity building.
Chief Executive Officer of OCP Africa, Alafifi Laadel, described the agreement as a long-term partnership focused on knowledge transfer, institutional development, and local capacity building rather than a conventional procurement arrangement. The development comes exactly three years after President Bola Tinubu declared a state of emergency on food security in July 2023. At its peak in early 2025, Nigeria's food inflation exceeded 40 per cent year-on-year, among the highest in the world, with rice, maize, tomatoes, and cooking oil recording the sharpest increases.
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