December 8, 2022/Hill+Knowlton Strategies
Andrew Uaboi, Vice President and Head, Visa West Africa makes a case for why creating favourable conditions for innovation is critical for access to the digital economy
As Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria offers substantial growth potential across several sectors. While much of our economic potential has traditionally been based on our status as one of the world’s ten largest exporters of crude oil, the government is keen to diversify by developing other industries.
However, one major hurdle to overcome first, is financial inclusion. By the end of 2020, just 64% of Nigerians were part of the formal financial system – still short of the government’s target of 80%.
The big question remains, how do we bridge this gap? While fintech partnerships are an important route towards improving access to the digital economy, the creation of a favorable ecosystem is also a critical factor, all geared toward establishing optimal conditions for innovation and entrepreneurship. There is a large body of published literature that offers frameworks outlining the right conditions for innovation[1], and this is something that Visa strives to enable through its network of global Innovation Centers, offering our partners a space to experiment and build solutions that bring more people and communities into the digital economy.
On digitalization of Nigeria’s economy, the agricultural sector is posed to reap the biggest benefits. In 2021[2], the sector contributed 25.9% to our real GDP and it employs more than 70% of our population – primarily at a subsistence level[3].
This is why the government sees the development of agriculture as an important means of employment generation, food security, and poverty reduction[4]. We saw this in the Agriculture Transformation Agenda 2011-2015, followed by the Agriculture Promotion Policy 2016-2020; two development frameworks that outline specific strategies – doubling the growth rate of the integrated agriculture sector to increase its contribution to the national GDP; reducing food imports to become a net exporter of key agricultural products; and integrating agricultural commodity value chains into the broader supply chains of domestic and foreign industries.
Given the importance of the agricultural sector to Nigeria, ThriveAgric, a start-up focused on digitizing the entire value chain for farmers, is a worthy regional winner of the 2022 Visa Everywhere Initiative (VEI) for the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (CEMEA) region.
VEI is an innovation program that helps start-ups unlock new opportunities, giving them a global platform to demonstrate their innovation, ideas, and groundbreaking solutions. Over the seven years since VEI’s launch, nearly 12,000 start-ups have taken part in the initiative, raising a collective $16 billion in funding.
ThriveAgric’s Agricultural Operating System helps map farmer’s lands, onboarding, recording visitations, record valuable harvest data, manage inventory, and monitor the progress of farms in real time. Over the past five years, it has disbursed financing worth more than $70 million to over 240,000
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-eight-essentials-of-innovation
[2] https://nairametrics.com/2022/03/10/largest-sectors-of-nigerian-economy-in-2021these-are-the-four-largest-sectors-of-the-nigerian-economy/
[3] https://www.fao.org/nigeria/fao-in-nigeria/nigeria-at-a-glance/en/
[4] https://www.nipc.gov.ng/opportunities/agriculture/
