Nigeria’s cassava industry is moving to build a more traceable digital supply chain, with the Nigerian Cassava Growers Association (NCGA) developing a biometric database that links farmers to their farms and production locations.
The initiative is intended to address one of the barriers facing Nigeria’s agricultural exports: the difficulty international buyers have in verifying where agricultural products come from and how they were produced.
The association is collecting farmers’ biometric information alongside farm location data, creating digital records that can eventually link cassava produce to specific growers and production areas. According to the NCGA, such traceability can strengthen buyer confidence and help Nigerian exporters meet international food-safety and market requirements. The scale-up, however, is being constrained by funding and logistics.
The association has more than 266,000 registered cassava farmers nationwide, but only about 8,500 have so far been fully digitised. That means fewer than 4% of its registered growers are currently covered by the biometric system, leaving a substantial gap between registration and usable digital farm records.
For Nigeria, closing that gap could have implications beyond farmer identification. Reliable farm-level data can help aggregators and processors establish where raw materials originate, improve supply-chain planning and provide documentation increasingly demanded by international buyers.
The move also comes as Nigeria seeks to increase the value generated from cassava rather than relying primarily on domestic commodity sales. The country has significant cassava production, but inconsistent supply, processing capacity, logistics and access to international markets continue to limit the sector’s ability to capture greater export value.
The NCGA has therefore called for greater investment in digital infrastructure, farmer sensitisation and partnerships to expand the system beyond its current coverage.
Nigeria is also developing a broader National Digital Farmers Registry, with the Federal Government saying its system will use farmer identification and geotagging to improve targeting of inputs, credit, insurance and extension services.
NBF Insight
For cassava, digitisation could become more than an administrative exercise. A verified record of who grows the crop and where it is produced can become part of the product itself, giving Nigerian processors and exporters the evidence needed to compete in markets where traceability influences purchasing decisions.
