- The Federal Government has partnered with Moroccan phosphate giant OCP Africa and Ground Truth Analytics to deploy the National Agro-Productivity System (NAPS), an AI-driven, satellite-powered agricultural monitoring platform.
- The real-time data system aims to bridge the long-standing discrepancy between projected planting metrics and actual harvest outputs, providing federal and state planners with precise intelligence every five days to stabilize trade and food security policy.
- Organizers confirmed that all high-resolution spatial mappings and sensitive field algorithms will be hosted locally on Nigerian servers, backed by structured technical knowledge transfer to domestic institutions.
The Federal Government has taken a major technological step to safeguard domestic food systems by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Moroccan entities to deploy Nigeria’s first satellite- and artificial intelligence-powered agricultural monitoring platform.
Eko Hot Blog reports that the initiative is designed to provide states and local governments with real-time, high-resolution geospatial intelligence on crop distribution, land availability, production trajectories, and emerging food security vulnerabilities.
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Ibrahim Hadejia, the Deputy Chief of Staff to the President (Office of the Vice President), finalized the bilateral agreement at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) in Ben Guerir, Morocco.
Representing Vice President Kashim Shettima, who chairs the Presidential Food Systems Coordinating Unit (PFSCU), Hadejia signed the pact alongside executives from OCP Africa and specialized geospatial tech firm Ground Truth Analytics.
The newly inaugurated partnership officially births the National Agro-Productivity System (NAPS).
Speaking at the signing ceremony, Hadejia emphasized that Nigeria must move past merely adopting external tech innovations and instead focus on establishing deep-rooted local engineering capacities capable of adapting advanced tools to the country’s unique geographical realities.
Executive Secretary of the PFSCU, Marion Moon, detailed that the NAPS framework serves as a direct intervention against costly information discrepancies that have historically plagued Nigerian food security planning.
Prior to this deployment, severe mid-season data gaps prevented the government from validating whether smallholder farmers actually cultivated their intended commodities or unexpectedly switched crops.
This lack of clear visibility regularly disrupted federal trade and reserve calculations, occasionally leading to artificial market gluts or unmitigated food deficits.
Operating under the broader National Agribusiness Policy Mechanism (NAPM) approved in late 2024, the platform has already been successfully piloted across 13 states, covering three consecutive agricultural cycles, the wet, dry, and minor planting windows.
The pilot gathered over one million data points across 2,000 communities, establishing a solid foundation for the technology’s phased national rollout.
Addressing potential data privacy concerns, the Chief Executive Officer of Ground Truth Analytics, Driss Kitane, confirmed that the platform guarantees absolute data sovereignty for Nigeria.
The infrastructure will be securely managed on Nigerian servers, keeping sensitive data entirely under domestic jurisdictional control. Demonstrating the system’s capabilities using high-resolution imagery from Kano State, Kitane illustrated how automated AI algorithms trace farming boundaries, distinguish plant species, and project harvest yields months in advance with up to 95 percent accuracy.
This high-tech deployment comes exactly three years after President Bola Tinubu’s July 2023 declaration of a state of emergency on food security, a move prompted by soaring food inflation following structural fiscal reforms.
By integrating satellite precision with local agricultural management, the federal delegation, which included representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA), and the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, aims to build a more predictable and resilient food balance sheet for the nation.
