Improving agriculture in Nigeria through public-private partnerships

Abstract

The agriculture sector in Nigeria has remained largely undeveloped. The reason for this is due to the limited public sector funding in the different agricultural value chains including research and development. On the other hand, there has also been very minimal private sector investment in the sector. The cause of this is a lack of incentive for the private sector in Nigeria to invest in sectors like agriculture with very informal market structures and therefore without clear paths to profitability. It is believed that these problems can be resolved with better collaboration between the private and public sector actors through the instrumentality of public-private partnerships (PPPs). This will increase investment in the sector by pooling both public and private sector resources and also create realizable and foreseeable income streams for investors. This fact seems to be finally catching on in Nigeria, where the government has initiated a number of PPP programmes to address some of these underlining problems. This paper looks at some of the PPP programmes that have been initiated by the government with particular focus on the provision of services, infrastructure, sustainable land use systems and the development of structured markets. This paper aims to evaluate the impact of these programmes and also suggest improvements that will ensure that agriculture PPPs are further enhanced in Nigeria.