Nigeria is taking a bold step toward modernizing its agriculture sector. On July 18, 2026, the Federal Government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Ben Guerir, Morocco, to deploy a satellite- and AI-powered crop monitoring platform.
This initiative aims to deliver real-time intelligence on agricultural land, crop distribution, production performance, and food security risks across the country.
The partnership involves Nigeria’s Presidential Food Systems Coordinating Unit (PFSCU), Morocco’s OCP Africa, and geospatial technology firm Ground Truth Analytics. It will establish Nigeria’s first national geospatial agricultural intelligence platform.
The Federal Government on Friday signed a Memorandum of Understanding to deploy a satellite- and artificial intelligence-powered agricultural monitoring platform that will give states and local governments real-time data and intelligence on Nigeria’s agricultural land, crop distribution, production performance, and emerging food security risks.
Agriculture remains the backbone of Nigeria’s economy, employing a large portion of the population and contributing significantly to GDP. However, challenges like unreliable data, climate variability, insecurity in farming regions, and post-harvest losses have hindered productivity and food security.
Deputy Chief of Staff to the President (in the Office of the Vice President), Senator Ibrahim Hadejia, signed the agreement on behalf of the FG at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guerir, Morocco, alongside representatives of the Morocco-based phosphate giant, OCP Africa, and geospatial technology firm Ground Truth Analytics.
According to a statement released Saturday by the Technical Assistant on Agriculture to the President (Office of the VP), Marion Moon, Hadejia represented the Chairperson of the Presidential Food Systems Coordinating Unit, Vice President Kashim Shettima, at the agreement signing involving the Unit, OCP Africa, and Ground Truth Analytics.
Speaking at the signing ceremony, Hadejia said, “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.
“Agriculture is being transformed by data, precision agriculture, artificial intelligence and geospatial technologies. Nigeria must build the capability not only to adopt these innovations but also to continually improve them, adapt them to our own context, and develop solutions that respond to our national priorities.
He added that the ambition behind the NAPS exceeds technology deployment, saying, “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.”
In her presentation earlier, Moon explained that the NAPS is the FG’s response to a persistent and costly information gap between what Nigerian farmers declare they will produce and what actually emerges from the field by harvest time.
She said, “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.
“We need stronger visibility during the season. If a farmer said they were going to plant maize, did they actually plant maize, or did they switch back to rice?
”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.”
She explained that this misalignment is not merely a logistical inconvenience but also a structural defect in how food policy is made in the country.
“Domestic production happens at the subnational level while trade policy decisions are made at the federal level,” she said, explaining, “The Federal Government needs real-time visibility into what is happening on the ground to make trade decisions that complement subnational production.”
Morocco brings valuable expertise. The North African nation has advanced agricultural technologies, including AI applications in crop management, making it a strategic partner for knowledge and technology transfer
Moon described the National Agribusiness Policy Mechanism, the framework within which NAPS operates, as a four-pillar system built around domestic production, reserves, imports, and exports, what she called “a food balance for Nigeria.”
The NAPM was approved by the National Council on Agriculture and Food Security in November 2024 and has since been piloted across 13 states covering all three planting seasons; the main wet season, the dry season, and what the PFSCU identified as a minor season, a third planting window that states such as Jigawa have exploited to ensure continuous wheat and rice planting cycles.
“The partnership reflects a shared commitment to building long-term capability through knowledge transfer, local capacity development and strong institutions ensuring that Nigeria is equipped not only to deploy advanced technologies but to continually strengthen and develop them over time,” she said.
Laadel described the NAPS technology as “replacing boots on the ground with AI and digital tools to read the data.”
In his presentation, Chief Executive Officer of Ground Truth Analytics, Driss Kitane, demonstrated how the technology will close the mid-season visibility gap.
Drawing on a Kano State demonstration, Kitane showed the Nigerian delegation how a stack of AI algorithms ingests raw satellite imagery and automatically delineates every agricultural parcel, identifies the crop growing on each one, and tracks its growth stage without manual input from a human operator.
He explained, “Every parcel you see here has been delineated by artificial intelligence; nobody manually drew them. We can do this at massive, country, and even continental scales. The images refresh every five days. We can cover all seasons and also observe the growth stage of each crop.”
In Morocco, he said, the same platform predicts national wheat production three months before harvest with 90 to 95 per cent accuracy, a capability, he argued, that has proved useful in the North African country where drought has reduced output between nine million and three million tonnes within a single decade.
Beyond governments, he noted, banks are already using the technology for farmer credit scoring, and cooperatives in Ghana are using it to verify that farmers who receive loans actually plant on the declared acreage.
The signing comes exactly three years after President Bola Tinubu declared a state of emergency on food security in July 2023, following the removal of the petrol subsidy and the unification of the naira exchange window, which triggered a food inflation spiral that pushed the cost of staples beyond the reach of millions of households.
At its peak in early 2025, Nigeria’s food inflation exceeded 40 per cent year-on-year, among the highest globally.
UNICEF estimates that over 31.8 million Nigerian children under five are acutely malnourished, the second-highest burden in the world after India.
The crisis was compounded by persistent insecurity in the North-West and North-Central farming belts, flooding and climate disruptions in the Middle Belt, and structural weaknesses in agricultural data infrastructure, which made it difficult for planners to accurately monitor production or anticipate shortfalls.
The Federal Government delegation in Morocco included representatives from the Office of the Vice President, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, the Federal Ministry of Justice, the National Space Research and Development Agency, the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, and other agencies supporting implementation of the National Agro-Productivity System.
Chief Executive Officer of Ground Truth Analytics, Driss Kitane, Deputy Chief of Staff to the President (in the Office of the Vice President), Senator Ibrahim Hadejia and Chief Executive Officer of OCP Africa, Alafifi Laadel, at the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding on National Agro-Productivity System between the PFSCU, OCP Africa and Ground Truth Analytics at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guerir, Morocco, on Friday.
This deal with Morocco signals a shift toward technology-led agriculture in Nigeria. By harnessing AI and satellite data, the FG is positioning the country to tackle food insecurity more effectively and unlock the full potential of its vast arable land.
As the rollout begins, stakeholders across the agricultural sector will be watching closely. If successful, this could serve as a model for other African nations facing similar challenges.
