Nigeria and Morocco have signed an artificial intelligence agreement to deploy a satellite-powered agricultural monitoring platform that will provide real-time data on crop production. The partnership aims to enhance agricultural productivity and monitoring capabilities across both nations using advanced satellite technology.
The Federal Government on Friday signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Morocco 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.
This was as the Presidency declared that the country must not only adopt emerging agricultural technologies but build its own capability to improve and adapt them to its national conditions.
Deputy Chief of Staff to the President (in the Office of the Vice President), 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.
The statement is titled ‘Nigeria Positions Itself for the Next Generation of Agriculture with Launch of National Agro-Productivity System Partnership.’
Moon, who is also the Executive Secretary of the Presidential Food Systems Coordinating Unit, revealed that the agreement launched Nigeria’s first satellite-powered national crop monitoring system.
It also marked the formal launch of the National Agro-Productivity System, a platform designed to provide federal and state governments with real-time, AI-generated intelligence on crop yields, land availability, and food security threats nationwide.
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.
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“It will strengthen seasonal planning, agricultural investment, productivity monitoring and policy coordination by providing Federal and State Governments with timely, reliable, and actionable agricultural intelligence to support better decision-making.”
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.”
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.
Across the pilot, the NAPM, she stated, reached 250,000 farmers, surveyed more than 50,000, covered more than 2,000 communities, focused on five key commodities, and collected over one million data points across the food balance.
For her part, Chief Executive Officer of OCP Africa, Alafifi Laadel, said the agreement is a generational commitment rather than a standard procurement arrangement.
“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.
On data sovereignty, Kitane said, “Everything we develop is sovereign to Nigeria. It will be hosted on Nigerian servers. All sensitive data stays on those servers, and no one can access that data unless Nigeria decides so.”
He outlined a three-phase implementation that will include a minimum viable product covering one state, with land-cover analysis for additional states. This will be followed by an expansion to three states with full crop intelligence and land cover for 15 states; and then a complete multi-season monitoring across all 15 priority states.
Receiving the Nigerian delegation at the University, UM6P President and Director General Hicham El Habti disclosed that Nigeria already has an outsized presence in the institution’s student population.
“Our medical school is now 100 per cent English,” he said, noting that 60 per cent of its students are Nigerian.
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.
With three years of experience, Stephen, The PUNCH correspondent, has been covering Nigeria’s presidency, politics, security, immigration and trafficking in persons
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