The Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, AGRA, has urged the Federal Government to consider a recent World Bank report and create an enabling environment for business to thrive in Nigeria.

Cassava farm

Dr Kehinde Makinde, the Country Manager of AGRA, who made the call in Abuja recently, said that efforts should be made to put in place an appropriate environment that would enable business to flourish in the country.

The World Bank recently released a report which rated some sub-sectors of the country’s agricultural sector as below the world standard.

In the report, the seed sub-sector got 48.85 per cent, markets got 49.24 per cent, transport got 46.30 per cent, water got 32.03 per cent, ICT got 50 per cent, fertiliser got 57.79 per cent, machinery got 63.07 per cent and finance got 57.21 per cent.

Some stakeholders in the agricultural sector, however, faulted the report, saying that data used in the study were collected before June 2017, while a lot of transformation had taken place in the agricultural sector since then.

Makinde said that the report on Enabling Business of Agriculture (EBA, 2017) for Nigeria” was somewhat a call on the Federal Government to address some of the challenges listed in the report.

There are 62 countries that were covered in this report

“The essence of the report is to provide information which policy actors like the private sector, policy-makers and the media can use in efforts to decipher the level of Nigeria and know what needs to be done to improve on these indicators,” he added.