Nigeria’s Meteorological Agency (NiMet) is advancing a digital platform designed to give farmers, livestock keepers and agricultural advisers access to location-specific weather and climate information for better production decisions.
The NiMet Data Hub, developed in collaboration with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and Crea2Solutions, has progressed from its initial design and mock-up stage to an advanced Minimum Viable Product (MVP), with the platform now undergoing testing. The project began in February 2026 under the Climate Services for Youth and Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa programmes and reached a testable stage by July.
The platform is intended to bring together historical, monitored and forecast climate information and make it more useful for people making decisions on the farm. Instead of providing weather information as a general forecast, the system is being developed to support context-specific agro-weather advisories that can help producers assess risks and plan agricultural activities around expected conditions.
NiMet and its partners identified fragmented climate data, limited coordination among information providers and difficulties translating technical forecasts into practical advice as some of the gaps the new system is designed to address. Stakeholder consultations have therefore focused on mapping Nigeria’s agro-meteorological data and advisory landscape, identifying information and delivery gaps and improving last-mile communication.
The hub is expected to serve more than crop farmers. Pastoralists, agricultural extension professionals, researchers, government institutions and private advisory providers are also among its intended users. NiMet's existing online map rooms and agricultural climate products are expected to feed into the system, while ILRI is contributing to the organisation and usability of research and climate data.
The move comes as Nigerian farmers face increasingly difficult decisions around rainfall variability, dry spells, flooding and heat. NiMet's 2026 Seasonal Climate Prediction already provides information on rainfall onset and cessation, rainfall amounts, growing-season length, temperature, dry spells and crop calendars, but translating this information into decisions at farm level remains a major challenge.
NiMet is also expanding the technology behind its climate services. In a separate partnership with AIM for Scale, the agency is working on integrating AI-based weather forecasting into digital advisory systems so that weather information can be translated into practical guidance on planting, input use and other farm decisions.
Another initiative, the Climate-Smart Agribusiness Partnership for Resilience, is embedding Climate Information Services into agricultural value chains. The project, launched in July 2026 with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, IFAD, SAPZ and NiMet, has already included automated weather stations in Ogun and Kano and the distribution of digital devices to farmer organisation leaders for weather advisory dissemination.
These developments point to a broader change in the role of meteorological information in Nigerian agriculture. Weather data now being treated not simply as a forecast to check before leaving home, but as an input that can influence planting dates, fertiliser application, irrigation, pest management, harvesting, livestock management and financial risk decisions.
NBF Insight
For smallholder farmers, weather information only creates value when it arrives in a form they can act on.
A rainfall forecast covering an entire state may be useful for planning at government level, but a farmer needs to know what conditions could mean for a particular location, crop and production decision.
NiMet's Data Hub represents a move towards that more practical model of climate services. Its success will depend not only on the accuracy of the underlying forecasts, but on whether the information reaches farmers on time, is understandable and can be translated into clear actions.
If NiMet and its partners can close that last-mile gap, weather data could become a more important agricultural input, helping farmers make better decisions before climate risks become farm losses.
