by Aliyu Bello | Jan 13, 2025
The Narrative Report on AgCSGS Online Committee Meetings highlights key discussions and recommendations from the October 2024 virtual meetings on the Agricultural Commodity Standards and Grading System (AgCSGS). Convened by the Nigeria Agribusiness Group (NABG) under the SSPS project, the sessions focused on developing a national grading policy to enhance the competitiveness of Nigeria’s agricultural commodities.
Key Highlights:
- Committees reviewed progress on policy development, standards, grading, and advocacy efforts.
- Ten pilot agro-commodities, including rice, oil palm, and sesame seeds, were identified for grading.
- Emphasis on broad stakeholder collaboration, local and state-level sensitization, and policy field-testing.
- Recommendations for a technical guidance document to support implementation.
This report underscores NABG’s commitment to establishing a bankable commodity trading system that drives transparency, fairness, and global competitiveness. Read the full document to explore actionable strategies for transforming Nigeria’s agricultural market.
Link to full Report
by iKml1 | Feb 23, 2024
Resilience Building In Nigeria FAO PROGRAMME REVIEW (2024)
PURPOSE:
This document reflects an analysis of ongoing FAO Nigeria resilience building interventions and how they contribute towards the five capacities for resilience building, namely:
• PREVENTIVE: reduce existing and future risks.
• ANTICIPATIVE: act early.
• ABSORPTIVE: the ability to bounce back, overwhelmingly humanitarian (emergency response).
• ADAPTIVE: incremental adjustments.
• TRANSFORMATIVE: make fundamental changes to the system.
The five capacity areas are in most cases overlapping dur- ing specific project implementation, with the classification based on the overarching resilience capacity area.
his review comes at a time when FAO seeks to review its Resilience work in Sub Saharan Africa with the overall objective to systematically capture, document, and dis- seminate insights and best practices related to resilience building within FAO programmes for scaling up. This is intended to facilitate and harness the opportunities, and lessons learned in emergency and resilience program- ming, and integration of emergency, resilience, and de- velopment work into the priorities of Member States.
The initiative is in view of the increasing number of food and nutrition insecure people in Africa, with the Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU) rising from 19.4 percent in 2021 to 19.7 percent in 2022, and the number of people facing hunger increasing by 11 million people since 2021 and by more than 57 million people since the outbreak of the COV- ID-19 pandemic. A much larger proportion of the population in Africa faces hunger compared to the other regions of the world – nearly 20 percent compared with 8.5 percent in Asia, 6.5 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 7.0 per- cent in Oceania.1 According to the region’s most recent economic update, growth in Sub-Saharan Africa was pro- jected to dip to 2.5 percent in 2023, down from 3.6 percent in 2022. Rising conflict and violence across the region ex- ert a dampening effect on economic activity, with climate shocks poised to exacerbate this fragility. About 462 mil- lion people in the region are still living in extreme pover- ty in 2023 even as growth remains uneven across the continent. While East Africa was set to record a growth rate of 1.8 percent in 2023, West Africa was expected to grow at a rate of 3.3 percent during the same year. Harnessing the potential of natural resources provides an opportuni- ty to improve the fiscal and debt sustainability of African countries. It is envisaged that if Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) can harness its natural resource wealth (oil, gas, and minerals), it can sustainably transform economically and create more job opportunities while transitioning into a low-carbon economy.
Link text
