Uchenna Cecil Izuora
Nigeria’s Rural Electrification Agency (REA) is positioning its next phase of rural electrification funding not as an energy programme but as a food security strategy, according to Managing Director/CEO Dr. Abba Abubakar Aliyu. Speaking at the opening of a workshop series bringing together government agencies, development partners, ECOWAS representatives and private sector players, Dr. Aliyu argued that connecting reliable power to agricultural productivity is now central to how Nigeria secures its food supply, not a side benefit of electrification.
Dr. Aliyu said the funding, drawn from the Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-up (DARES) Programme, breaks down into $250 million for standalone solar systems, $100 million for “Solar as a Business”, covering energy systems up to 100 kilowatts for economic clusters and agricultural sites, and $50 million earmarked specifically for productive-use equipment. He translated that last figure into concrete terms: $50 million could fund more than 35,000 solar-powered irrigation pumps, or 45,000 solar-powered cold storage units, or roughly 100,000 modular rice mills, depending on how it’s allocated.
Central to Dr. Aliyu’s framing was the idea that Nigeria’s rural economy is fragmented rather than small. He described a smallholder farmer in Jigawa producing half a tonne of rice, a woman processor in Kano milling fifty kilograms of grain a day, and an irrigation cooperative in Taraba cultivating two hectares of tomatoes, each looking marginal in isolation, but forming the backbone of the country’s food system when aggregated across thousands of communities and all 36 states. That aggregation, he argued, is what a properly built electrification-agriculture system needs to capture.
Dr. Aliyu said REA’s past efforts, while meaningful, fell short of their potential because supporting institutions were brought in after deployment rather than during the design phase. He pointed to the AfDB-funded National Electrification Project’s Energy Efficient Productive Use Equipment component, which disbursed close to $20 million and reached more than a million Nigerians, and the Energizing Agriculture Programme, which built a pipeline of over 120 bankable energy-agriculture sites, 23 of which were later developed into working mini-grids under the Africa Minigrids Programme. “We had the energy. We needed the ecosystem,” he said.
That’s the gap Dr. Aliyu said the current workshop series is designed to close, by bringing agencies such as NIRSAL and the Bank of Agriculture, along with commodity exchanges and private sector partners, into the planning process from the outset. He closed by asking every institution at the workshop to commit not just to the opening session but to the full series of engagements to follow, covering financing design, technology standards and deployment pipelines, framing the effort as building a system meant to outlast any single funding cycle.