• Financing frameworks developed for fertiliser, grains and mechanisation of agriculture at scale, etc. to address working capital constraints associated with specific segments of the agricultural value chain. • Index-based insurance products to protect farmers’ revenues from losses due to pests, diseases, adverse weather conditions and general drops in expected yields. • Technical assistance support and capacity building for both agriculture and agriculture finance actors. • Comprehensive field monitoring comprising nationwide boots-on-ground Project Monitoring, Reporting and Remediation Officers, remote sensing using satellite based multispectral imaging and UAS-based monitoring. • Farmer structuring through the NIRSAL Agro Geo-Cooperative® Farming Model. Can you tell us about some of NIRSAL’s greatest achievements to date? Since its creation to date, NIRSAL Plc has made considerable progress. As a result of rigorous prudence, NIRSAL has recorded less than 1% risk crystallisation or claims payout on its core transactions. The company has also paid out over $7 million in Interest Drawback in support of good borrower behaviour. NIRSAL Plc has provided training and facilitated Agribusiness clinics for more than 700,000 farmers and over 4,200 Agric-desk officers of commercial banks across the country to build capacity and enhance productivity and the flow of finance and investments to the sector. In the area of Insurance, over 1.9 million farmers have so far subscribed to NIRSALfacilitated index-based agricultural insurance products. Additionally, nine insurance companies have secured approvals from the National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) for the deployment of agricultural Insurance products as a result of NIRSAL Plc’s support. In 2021, NIRSAL Plc also completed the development of Climate Risk Profiles (CRPs) for an initial six of 15+ agricultural commodities. CPRs are comprehensive guides to investing in the production of some select Industrial, Consumer and Export commodities in climatechallenged environments. This is projected to be a useful guide to our farming stakeholders for the next 40 years at a minimum. The direct consequence of NIRSAL Plc’s aforementioned finance facilitation efforts is an estimated $2.5 billion worth of economic activity through agricultural products/outputs by the company’s interventions across agricultural value chains. How is NIRSAL contributing towards the attainment of Nigeria’s food security goals? The unstructured nature of primary production (farming) activities in Nigeria has historically deprived the country of the benefits that lie in economies of scale, mechanization and commercialization of agricultural production for optimum yields and financial returns. From this viewpoint, NIRSAL has introduced several innovations to address the current suboptimal agricultural production system, which is a major threat to food security in the country. Some of these innovations include: 1) NIRSAL’s Agro Geo-Cooperative® (AGC) farming model. This is a structured approach to addressing the inefficiencies associated with prevalent smallholder farming on disaggregated plots of land measuring 0.5 to 1.5 hectares on average, based on convenience or cultural preferences. Through the Agro Geo-Cooperative® farming model, NIRSAL aggregates parcels of contiguous farmlands of up to 250-hectare sizes within mapped Agricultural Commodity Ecological Areas (ACEA) then subsequently facilitates the flow of finance and investments to them whilst linking them to the Agricultural Input and Output markets. So far, up to 4,300 of these Agro GeoCooperatives® have been formed, covering over 943,297 hectares and 679,587 farmers. We have also formed 233 virtual Agro GeoCooperatives® (for non-crops) covering 7.5million production units of aquaculture and 17 www. ceotodaymagazine . com Niger ia
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