NITDA Targets 10m Farmers with Smart Farming Digital Platform

The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Monday said it was targeting to engage 10 million farmers across the agricultural value-chain by the year 2032, through its smart farming digital platform, under the National Adopted Village for Smart Agriculture (NAVSA).

The Deputy Manager, Department of Digital Economy, NITDA, Lukman Lamid, disclosed this at a capacity-building programme on NAVSA digital platform for students of the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB), Ogun State.

According to Lamid, the platform is a mobile application, which is developed by NITDA and equipped with modern technology, such as smart irrigation and brooding systems, virtual accounts and loan facilities for farmers.

“No fewer than 100 students of FUNAAB would be trained on the use of modern technologies for farmers at the five-day event,” he said.

Also, he said at the end of the training, beneficiaries would be given N100,000 loans in their virtual accounts as start-up capital for their enterprises, noting that the platform, which is still at the pilot stage, has engaged more than 600 farmers from Gombe, Jigawa, Ekiti and Ogun states.

Meanwhile, Lamid attributed the low food production by Nigerian farmers to the low adoption of mechanised farming and technology, saying, “Agriculture is the least digitised sector of the economy.”

He lamented that most of the interventions in agriculture by the Federal Government and other financial institutions had failed to yield the desired results “because the majority of Nigerian farmers are yet to deploy technology in agricultural production.”

He said: “We have discovered that there is low productivity in agriculture and we have also discovered that most of the interventions in agriculture are not yielding the desired results. We looked at all these as an agency to see what we can do differently as far as the agricultural sector is concerned.

“This project is conceived to use digital technology and innovation to improve every process of agricultural practice to increase productivity and at the same time ensure that there is maximum profit for farmers.”

The original article first appeared on AgroNigeria.