Nigeria’s prospects of agricultural industrialisation will take a leap forward this week with the groundbreaking of two major agro-processing zones in Kaduna and Cross River States, under the first phase of the Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zones (SAPZ) program – a $538 million collaboration between the African Development Bank, Federal government of Nigeria and State governments, and development partners.
The two States and six others including the Federal Capital Territory form the first phase, while the planned second phase will cover an additional 24 States. The African Development Bank’s Board of Directors is scheduled to discuss Phase II in June.
While the SAPZ in Kaduna State will prioritize maize, ginger, soybeans, and tomatoes, Cross River State’s SAPZ will focus on cocoa, cassava, and rice. Oyo State took the lead in November 2024 with the groundbreaking on an Agricultural Transformation Centre that will anchor its SAPZ and serve as a national model. The goal in every location is to, in the words of the President of the African Development Bank Group, Dr. Akinwumi A. Adesina, “turn rural zones of misery into zones of prosperity.”
Regional development institutions, multilateral, non-profit and civil society organization partnerships are bolstering the Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zones; key among these include the Islamic Development Bank, International Fund for Agricultural Development, Arab Bank For Economic Development In Africa, and Arise IIP. At the Africa Investment Forum in December 2024, a special session on the planned second phase of the SAPZ Nigeria program mobilized over $2 billion in investor interest.
There’s arguably no bigger champion of the promise and potential of African agriculture today than the African Development Bank and its President, Dr. Adesina. Upon assumption of office in 2015, Adesina unveiled a “High 5s” – or priority areas – agenda, with food security featuring as one of the pillars (“Feed Africa”).
He’s since followed this up with the launch of the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) programme – which utilizes climate-smart, higher-producing seed technologies with the aim of producing an additional 120 million metric tons of food and lifting 130 million Africans out of poverty.
Dr. Adesina also led the January 2023 convening, in partnership with the Government of Senegal, of a Feed Africa Summit in Dakar. Also known as “Dakar 2,” the summit mobilized an unprecedented $72 billion in agriculture-related investment commitments from countries and development partners, in addition to producing national compacts for more than 40 African countries. The Country Food and Agriculture Delivery Compacts are detailed roadmaps for implementing solutions that will deliver self-sufficiency.
As climate change increasingly poses threats to food cultivation and production in Africa, the African Development Bank has ramped up its investments in climate adaptation and mitigation. Now, climate financing takes up close to half of the Bank’s total project approvals, up from about a tenth in 2016. With the Bank growing its capital base from $93 billion in 2015 to $318 billion today, it is better placed than ever before to support the most ambitious plans and projects for Africa’s development.
Dr. Adesina says it is a tragedy that a continent that could comfortably feed the entire world is still struggling to feed itself – an estimated 283 million Africans currently go to bed hungry. He speaks often of his determination to transform Africa’s agriculture from merely a way of life to “a viable, sustainable, lucrative, and wealth-creating business.”
In March, he participated in a summit in Nairobi, Kenya, co-hosted by the African Development Bank and the Pan African Farmers Organization to discuss mobilizing additional financing for Africa’s smallholder farmers. That trip also provided an opportunity for him to affirm the joint commitment of the Bank and Mastercard towards providing three million smallholder farmers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria with access to credit, inputs and markets, through a new digital system called the Mobilizing Access to the Digital Economy, or MADE Alliance: Africa.
The Bank has also just finalized a new Country Strategy Paper for Nigeria, with agriculture at its heart – providing for, among other things, the extension of its financing of the National Agricultural Growth Scheme, launched in 2022 to raise domestic production of wheat, maize, and other staples. A version of that programme launched in Ethiopia in 2018 helped raise irrigation-fed cultivation from 5,000 hectares to over a million hectares within four years, and the Ethiopian government says the East African country has become a self-sufficient producer and exporter of wheat. The Bank is hoping to replicate this in Nigeria, and expectation is rising.
The SAPZ Nigeria initiative will complement this with the groundbreaking events in Kaduna and Cross River States heralding a wave of new construction activity at various SAPZ sites across the country, and embodying the growing momentum in the implementation of the Bank’s vision for Nigeria’s agriculture sector.
The SAPZ program, being developed in 27 sites across 11 African countries, is one of Africa’s most ambitious industrialization programs. Launched by the Bank in 2022, it aims to mobilize billions of dollars for the development of industrial clusters that integrate the agricultural value-chain – producers, processors, aggregators, distributors – and enable the efficient transformation of agricultural produce into high-value processed goods for local and export markets.
As Adesina’s presidential tenure winds down, a season of stock-taking and valediction has kicked off. It’s also a time for doubling down on legacy initiatives. For a man who prides himself as being the first agricultural economist to head a major development bank in the world, the SAPZ groundbreaking ceremonies in Nigeria will be a perfect concluding chapter to a presidential decade that has tirelessly supported the continent to grow, preserve and process more food, through high-impact technologies, climate-resilient inputs, technical assistance, and increased access to credit.
It will also be a fitting transition into the next phase, post-African Development Bank, of advancing the sustainable transformation of Africa’s economies.
– Tolu Ogunlesi is a writer and communications professional based in Abuja, Nigeria
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