The federal government has urged African countries to treat agricultural extension as critical infrastructure needed to improve productivity and achieve food security.

Abubakar Kyari, Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, made the call on Wednesday in Abuja at the Africa Agribusiness Extension Summit 2026.

The summit, organised by Extension Africa, has the theme: “Building Sustainable Agricultural Advisory Infrastructure for Africa.”

Mr Kyari said Africa could not feed its projected 2.5 billion population by 2050 by expanding farmland alone but needed to raise productivity through improved access to knowledge and advisory services.

“Extension must be treated as infrastructure. Roads and power lines are judged by whether they carry what the economy needs every day.

“A project can deliver advice for three seasons; infrastructure must deliver it for 30 years,” he said.

Mr Kyari said Africa should embrace artificial intelligence (AI) in agricultural extension but stressed that technology should complement rather than replace professional extension workers.

He said digital systems must also protect farmers’ data and work through Short Message Service (SMS), Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) and voice services accessible on basic phones and weak networks.

“A registry tells us who the farmer is, where the farm lies and what grows on it. Extension tells the farmer what to do next.

“When the two are joined, advice stops being a broadcast and becomes a prescription,” he said.

Tracing Nigeria’s extension system from community town criers and village farm teachers to the Moore Plantation in Ibadan in 1905, Mr Kyari said the sector had once commanded considerable respect but had been weakened by inadequate financing.

He recalled that the World Bank-supported Agricultural Development Programmes (ADPs) once operated at a ratio of one extension agent to between 1,000 and 1,500 farm families.

According to him, the decline in support left many positions vacant, with one extension agent now serving between 5,000 and 10,000 farmers in some areas.

“No field officer, however committed, can meaningfully serve that number through physical visits alone,” he said.

Mr Kyari said the challenge before Africa was no longer whether extension was needed, but how to build a system capable of meeting future demand at scale.

“The future of extension is already in the farmer’s hand,” he said.

He recalled that in the early 2010s, the National Agricultural Extension Research and Liaison Services (NAERLS) responded to almost 4,000 farmer enquiries by telephone.

He said the same technology could now provide farmers with weather alerts, market information and guidance on crop diseases.

Mr Kyari said more than 100,000 farmers in six states were receiving weekly climate advisory text messages through the Federal Department of Agricultural Extension, the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) and private partners.

He said the government had also deployed more than 1,000 digital extension agents with tablets and 774 desk officers across the 774 local government areas (LGAs).

According to him, the government was also rolling out a digital platform capable of communicating with farmers in Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba and Pidgin while transmitting farmers’ challenges to specialists.

Mr Kyari said government had approved a steering committee to harmonise extension initiatives involving NAERLS, the National Agricultural Quarantine Service (NAQS), the Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria (ARCN) and NiMet.

He said the move was aimed at reducing fragmented messages reaching farmers from different agencies.

The minister commended states investing in extension, citing Jigawa, Kano and Oyo as examples.

He said Jigawa had recruited more than 1,500 agents to cover 55,000 hectares during its wheat season and approved 1,185 motorcycles for their mobility.

Mr Kyari said Kano recruited 1,038 agents in 2025, while Oyo trained 131 agents in digital farmland measurement and another 116 in improved mapping applications.

He urged African countries to deliberately design extension systems that reached young people and women.

According to him, extension could provide young graduates with livelihood opportunities without requiring them to own farmland, while women involved in planting, processing and marketing had historically received inadequate attention.

He said this had contributed to the establishment of Women in Agriculture units in 1986.

“Advisory infrastructure that does not reach women directly leaves a substantial part of African agriculture without the knowledge it needs,” he said.

Mr Kyari noted that Africa’s population exceeded 1.5 billion in 2024 and was projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050, while Nigeria’s population was projected to approach 400 million within the same period.

He said agriculture accounted for 34 per cent of jobs in Nigeria and more than 50 per cent across Africa, making the sector important to both food security and livelihoods.

The minister urged participants to develop shared African standards for agricultural extension.

“Africa does not need to solve these challenges country by country. Knowledge can travel,” he said.

(NAN)