fbpx

Private Funds To Spark Nigerian Agriculture Boom

Private Funds To Spark Nigerian Agriculture Boom

From AFP via eNCA

Can investors get rich by backing Nigerian agriculture?

An increasingly loud chorus of voices say that answering this question may be the most pressing challenge facing Africa’s most populous country, ahead of defeating Boko Haram Islamists or curbing rampant corruption.

Nigeria last week jumped ahead of South Africa as the continent’s biggest economy after the re-calculated results of national output were announced.

But in terms of per capita income, Nigeria’s global ranking is still a grim 121, with 84 percent of its 170 million people living on less than $2 per day, according to 2010 World Bank estimates.

Experts agree that agriculture offers the best chance to generate millions of new jobs quickly.

But, while job creation and improving food security are national priorities, the best way to spark an agriculture boom is to focus on profit, said agriculture minister Akinwumi Adesina.

“It is not about bread,” he told a conference of business and government leaders last month. “It is about making money.”

It is not about bread … it is about making money

Armed with degrees from elite US universities, including Harvard Business School, Nigerian Kola Masha returned home in 2007 looking to launch a business with a positive social impact.

Youth unemployment was the greatest threat facing Nigeria but few people realised how dire the situation had become, he told AFP.

From 2007 to 2010, Nigeria had one of the world’s fastest growing economies. However the number of people unemployed also rose by 16 percent each year. Youths were especially hard hit, with 56 percent out of work in 2010, according to official data.

The trend was in part a result of the so-called oil curse: Nigeria, Africa’s top crude producer, has given excessive attention to the oil industry which generates very few jobs, while ignoring job-creating sectors.

“Most people I shared that with said, ‘Oh my God, it’s a time bomb’ and I said ‘no my friend, it’s a bomb that has already gone off’,” Masha said.

Read more at eNCA