The Development Gateway in partnership with the International Fertilizer Development Centre has launched the Visualizing Insights on Fertilizer for African Agriculture (VIFAA) dashboard for Nigeria.
The project, sponsored by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will assist the private and public sector with easy access to data on quality fertilizers, good pricing, consumption, and product availability.
Nigeria flagged off the Presidential Fertilizer Initiative (PFI) in December 2016.
The project aims to ensure local production of fertilizer and ensure efficient distribution to farmers.
The Nigeria fertilizer industry possesses a blending capacity of 4 million tones of NPK fertilizer annually and 2 million tones of production for urea.
The industry is believed to have the capacity to employ over 250,000 people through both direct and indirect jobs across the nation.
At the launch, the VIFAA project manager in Nigeria for Development Gateway, Beverley Hatcher-Mbu, said data gathered on the dashboard will be useful to experts in both the private and public sectors.
“We worked closely with the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) that has an office here in Nigeria. So they both collect their own data, including retail price and they also work closely in what we call the fertilizer technical working group to ensure that all key actors agree on the key data points that show up on the dashboard,” she said.
“So it’s not that the public sector and private sector use different data and are trying to figure out what the best part is. Now, it’s clear that Nigeria has moved from being an import to an exporter.
So how does that change the decisions that companies make? How does that change the decisions that the public sector makes, we want everybody to have the best, most trustworthy data available to make decisions together? So that’s really for us, the key output of this dashboard,” she added.
The Registrar/CEO of the Nigeria Institute of Soil Science, Victor Chude, said the four-year program will address the supply, demand and use of fertilizer data in Nigeria.
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