By Ese Ufuoma
Nigeria is taking another step toward turning its agricultural potential into an industrial reality. The African Development Bank (AfDB) approved a $200 million financing tranche in December 2025 to expand the country’s Special AgroIndustrial Processing Zones (SAPZ) program, a strategic initiative designed to industrialise agriculture by integrating farming, processing, and markets.
The program was launched by the Federal Government of Nigeria in 2018 in collaboration with the AfDB to address a long-standing structural problem. The country produces large volumes of crops like cassava, rice, maize, and tomatoes, but lacks the processing capacity to turn them into higher-value products. This gap results in high post harvest losses, low incomes for farmers, and massive imports of processed food and agricultural products.
The idea behind SAPZ is to cluster processing facilities, storage, logistics, and market access near production hubs, creating industrial ecosystems that link farmers, processors, traders, and investors. The zones aim to:
*Reduce post-harvest losses.
*Promote value addition in agricultural commodities.
*Attract private sector investment.
*Generate employment, especially for youth and women.
*Reduce dependency on imported processed food.
SAPZ is modelled after industrial cluster concepts, adapted to agriculture. The AfDB and other development partners provide initial funding and infrastructure support, which is expected to bring in private investment. Initial phases of the program covered key states including Kaduna, Cross River, Oyo, Ogun, Kano, Kwara, Imo, and the Federal Capital Territory. These zones host processing facilities for rice, cassava, maize, poultry, and oilseed products.
The $200 million financing expands the program to 10 additional states as part of Phase II. The funding is not a grant; it is structured to catalyse private sector participation, with the AfDB estimating that up to $1.5 billion in complementary private investments could be mobilised across processing, logistics, storage, and related agribusiness operations. This scaling is expected to significantly increase the industrial processing of staples like cassava, rice, maize, and tomatoes.
Despite being one of Africa’s largest agricultural producers, Nigeria continues to spend billions of dollars importing processed foods. In 2024 alone, the food import bill was estimated at $4.7 billion, a drain on foreign exchange and vulnerability for food security. SAPZ aims to reverse this by ensuring that more of Nigeria’s agricultural output is processed domestically, retaining value within the country.
Phase II zones are expected to:
*Create over 1.1 million jobs, with 60% targeted at youth and at least 50% for women.
*Integrate hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers into formal supply chains.
*Support export-ready processed products for West African and international markets.
Although the challenges remain reliable power, rural roads, logistics, and cold storage, as these are critical to making processing hubs viable. Additionally, smallholder farmers need support with training, finance, and quality standards to supply factories consistently. Without addressing these gaps, SAPZ risks underperforming.
Nevertheless, the $200 million tranche demonstrates a serious commitment to industrialising Nigerian agriculture. Unlike previous interventions that focused on boosting farm output alone, SAPZ integrates production with processing and markets a shift that could transform rural economies, reduce imports, generate jobs, and position Nigeria as a competitive agro-industrial hub in Africa.
Nigeria’s Local Content Gamble:
The Final Push to 70%
Nigeria’s local content journey has entered its most decisive phase. From a modest 26% at inception to 61% by late 2025, the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) has quietly reshaped the structure of the oil and gas industry, building indigenous capacity, enforcing compliance, and turning policy into industrial execution. Now, with a bold 70% target set for 2027, the final stretch may prove the hardest yet.
In this cover story, The Valuechain Energy Magazine examines the NCDMB’s 10-Year Strategic Roadmap, unpacking the five pillars driving Nigeria’s local content transformation, from technical capability and enforcement to investment climate reform and cross-sector industrial linkages. More importantly, it interrogates the risks, bottlenecks, and unresolved questions behind the numbers.
Is Nigeria on the brink of locking in irreversible industrial capacity, or approaching the limits of policy-driven localisation? As global capital tightens and the energy transition accelerates, the answer will shape the future of Nigeria’s energy value chain.