The federal government has introduced Nigeria’s first satellite and artificial intelligence powered national crop monitoring platform, designed to deliver real time data on crop production, land use and emerging food security risks to guide policy decisions.
The system was unveiled through a memorandum of understanding signed in Ben Guerir, Morocco, and is intended to close a major gap in Nigeria’s agricultural planning: the absence of reliable, in season information on what farmers are actually growing nationwide.
The agreement, signed by the Presidential Food Systems Coordinating Unit, Morocco’s OCP Africa and geospatial technology firm Ground Truth Analytics, will see the technology rolled out in stages across 15 priority states before wider expansion.
Deputy Chief of Staff to the President in the Office of the Vice President, Senator Ibrahim Hassan Hadejia, signed on behalf of the federal government at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, representing Vice President Kashim Shettima in his role chairing the coordinating unit.
According to Marion Moon, Technical Assistant on Agriculture to the President and Executive Secretary of the coordinating unit, the agreement also formally launched the National Agro Productivity System, which will supply federal and state governments with AI generated intelligence on crop yields, available farmland and food security risks nationwide.
The launch comes three years after the Tinubu administration declared a national food security emergency in July 2023 amid rising food prices linked to economic reforms. Food inflation exceeded 40 percent year on year at the height of the crisis in early 2025, with insecurity, flooding and climate shocks further straining production and planning.
Hadejia said Nigeria must move beyond simply adopting existing agricultural technologies and instead build the local capacity to adapt and improve them for the country’s specific conditions, arguing that current challenges should inspire greater ambition rather than limit it.
He said agriculture is increasingly shaped by data, artificial intelligence, precision farming and geospatial tools, and that Nigeria must develop the expertise to deploy and refine such systems. He added that the platform would strengthen seasonal planning, investment decisions and policy coordination by providing timely agricultural intelligence, and that the broader goal is a Nigerian owned capability supported by local institutions and sustained through knowledge transfer and ongoing training.
Moon said the initiative addresses a persistent gap between what farmers declare they will plant and what they actually produce, calling in season monitoring one of the biggest weaknesses in the country’s agricultural planning. She explained that real time tracking would help prevent costly policy errors, such as releasing food reserves based on incorrect assumptions about which crops farmers ultimately planted.
She said the new system operates within the National Agribusiness Policy Mechanism, a framework approved by the National Council on Agriculture and Food Security in November 2024 to balance production, reserves, imports and exports. She noted that a pilot version had already covered 13 states across multiple planting seasons, reaching about 250,000 farmers, surveying more than 50,000 producers across over 2,000 communities and collecting more than a million agricultural data points on five major commodities.
OCP Africa Chief Executive Alafifi Laadel described the agreement as a long term partnership centered on building Nigerian capacity rather than simply supplying technology, emphasizing knowledge transfer and institutional development. She said the platform effectively replaces extensive manual field inspections with AI based remote analysis.
Ground Truth Analytics Chief Executive Driss Kitane demonstrated the technology, explaining that artificial intelligence automatically identifies every farm parcel from satellite imagery without human input, determining crops grown and tracking growth stages, with images refreshed every five days across all seasons at national and continental scale.
Kitane said the same technology already predicts Morocco’s national wheat harvest up to three months ahead of time with 90 to 95 percent accuracy, and is used by banks for agricultural credit assessments and by farming cooperatives in Ghana to confirm loan recipients are cultivating the land they claim. He assured that all Nigerian data generated under the project would remain hosted on Nigerian servers under full national control.
He outlined a three stage rollout, beginning with a pilot in one state, expanding to three states with fuller crop and land cover mapping, and eventually reaching full multi season monitoring across all 15 priority states.
Mohammed VI Polytechnic University President Hicham El Habti, who hosted the Nigerian delegation, highlighted the institution’s growing academic ties with Nigeria, noting that Nigerian students make up about 60 percent of enrollment in its now fully English language medical school.
The Nigerian delegation 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 and the Nigeria Governors Forum, among other agencies involved in implementing the new system.
