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SO2 – Economic Reform and Agriculture photo of fish farming

USAID is helping Nigeria recover from years of economic mismanagement and corruption by supporting efforts to:

  • strengthen Nigeria's policy instruments and institutional capacity for economic growth;
  • increase farmer's access to and use of improved agricultural technologies and yield-enhancing inputs;
  • improve the operating environment for the private sector and increase availability and quality of selected private-sector services.
USAID has worked to build Nigeria's competitiveness, supported training and capacity building for key government ministries, and helped to prepare government-owned businesses for privatization. In agriculture, USAID provides farmers with improved technologies, seeds, and farming techniques and promotes the development of agribusiness enterprises in such areas as input distribution and post-harvest processing. A microfinance program to be launched in 2003 will increase credit access for micro and small enterprises by establishing a small number of sustainable micro-credit institutions as models for replication in Nigeria.

Key results: The major emphasis of USAID’s private sector development program to date has been focused on privatization of the inefficient, unproductive, and heavily subsidized state-owned enterprises that dominate the Nigerian economy. Support to the Bureau for Public Enterprise (BPE) has transformed the organization into a model of technical proficiency and operational transparency that has prepared 92 state-owned enterprises for divestiture. Completed sales have brought in over $400 million in revenues. The success of USAID’s capacity-building efforts can be gauged by the fact that USAID’s initial investment of $10 million has leveraged an additional $127 million in support from the World Bank and other donors for privatization efforts. The results of the USAID-funded Investor’s Roadmap, detailing the multitude of obstacles to investment in the Nigerian economy, prompted the President to issue a Directive to find ways to speed up business registration and remove other such constraints. The government has also responded proactively to the USAID-funded nationwide corruption survey and will actively sponsor dissemination of the survey results. Anti-corruption media messages have been developed and broadcast on radio and TV by popular media personalities, and promotional materials such as T-shirts, buttons, and caps have been designed and distributed to the public.

In the agriculture sector, USAID has helped farmers in northern Nigeria to more than double sorghum and cowpea production by introducing improved farming techniques and seed varieties. USAID collaboration with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Abia, Adamawa, Oyo, and Katsina states links farmers with Nigeria's industrial consumers of agricultural products (such as Guinness and Nestle), facilitating supply contracts worth nearly $3 million, increasing farmer's incomes by 20% while at the same time reducing agro-industry costs by 15%. USAID interventions have also expanded the provision of fertilizer, improved seed, and agricultural chemicals through private-sector dealers in two States, and have provided direct, hands-on technical assistance to over 15,000 farmers and entrepreneurs across the country