Nigeria’s Policy Innovation Hub: From Evidence to Action
Launched in April 2026, Nigeria’s Policy Innovation Hub connects research evidence with practical implementation. By fostering high-level partnerships and demand-driven agendas, the Hub focuses on climate resilience, gender inclusion, and private-sector investment to transform Nigeria’s agrifood systems and provide a scalable model for regional policy reform.
On 9 April 2026, Nigeria officially launched the CGIAR Policy Innovation Hub at the Abuja Continental Hotel, one of five hubs established globally this year, alongside Ethiopia, India, Kenya, and Malawi. Jointly led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), the hub is designed as a structured, demand-driven platform to bridge the persistent gap between research evidence and on-the-ground implementation, ensuring research priorities shape research agendas, translating insights into policy solutions, and supporting their practical testing and scaling up. The event convened senior government ministers, national research institutions, development partners, and civil society organizations under the theme “Expanding Partnerships for Transformative Impact: Accelerating Nigeria’s Agrifood System Transformation.”
Nigeria’s food, land, and water systems sit at a critical juncture. The country has strong policy frameworks, including the National Agricultural Technology and Innovation Policy (NATIP 2022 - 2027) and the National Development Plan (2021–2025). Yet persistent gaps between policy formulation and on-the-ground delivery continue to limit the impact on smallholder farmers, women, and youth. Nigeria’s selection as a hub country reflects more than the urgency of its challenges, but also the strength of its foundation. Nigeria brings together robust research and academic institutions, a government openly committed to evidence-based policymaking, and a growing ecosystem of innovators willing to test new approaches to agricultural transformation. These conditions make Nigeria not just a site for change, but a learning laboratory whose insights can inform and accelerate agrifood policy reforms beyond its borders. The hub arrives at a moment when government, development partners, and the private sector have explicitly recognized that the challenge is not a lack of evidence, but a lack of structured mechanisms to translate that evidence into decisions and outcomes.
The event brought together various stakeholders in the agricultural policy space. In attendance were Hajiya Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim, Honorable Minister, Federal Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development; Dr. Tanimu Ibrahim, Director, Planning, Policy & Coordination, representing the Minister, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security (FMAFS); Dr Adamu Abubakar Dabo, Executive Secretary, Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria (ARCN); Ebiho Agun, Special Assistant to the Minister, Federal Ministry of Youth Development; Dede Ekoue, Country Director, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD); and Prof. Abba Gambo, Senior Agricultural Advisor to the Nigeria Governors Forum. Also represented were the World Bank, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the European Union, other CGIAR centers, Sahel Consulting, the National Sesame Seed Association of Nigeria, among others. The depth and diversity of participation reflected the strong stakeholder commitment to the hub's mandate and the urgency of the agenda it is designed to advance.
Identifying the Demand: Policy Gaps and Research Needs
Stakeholders at the launch identified the following specific policy gaps and research needs:
- Bridging the research-evidence-to-policy gap: Flagship programmes with proven results have repeatedly failed to sustain their gain not primarily because of implementation capacity alone, but because the evidence informing their design is rarely co-created with the actors who must act on it and rarely updated in response to shifting ground realities. Stakeholders called for structured mechanisms through which the Hub can supply demand-driven, policy relevant evidence that shapes how federal-level priorities are formulated, communicated, and adapted.
- Gender and youth inclusion from the design stage: Women remain structurally excluded from land access, finance, extension services, and market linkages despite being central actors across the agricultural value chain. Youth face comparable barriers. Yet gender and youth considerations are routinely added as post-design amendments rather than integrated from the outset of policy and programme architecture. Stakeholders identified a critical gap in co-created research that embeds gender-disaggregated evidence and youth-specific constraints into the earliest stages of policy design.
- Private sector investment bottlenecks: The private sector’s appetite for investment in Nigeria’s agri-food system is constrained not by capital but by confidence. Unpredictable policy shifts, NAFDAC regulatory compliance processes, and inadequate agro-processing infrastructure were identified as the most actionable barriers. Digitizing compliance and developing functional agro-processing zones emerged as priority reform areas requiring evidence-based advocacy.
- Fragmented data and under-utilized civil society knowledge: Farmer organizations and civil society bodies hold real-time, disaggregated data by gender, geography, commodity, and age that is more current and granular than most commissioned studies, yet this data is systematically excluded from policy processes. Stakeholders identified a research and governance gap in the formal integration of these actors as co-creators of policy rather than merely as consultees.
- Climate resilience and agricultural finance: Nigeria’s most productive agricultural states are facing compounding pressures from climate variability - dry spells, flooding, and deforestation - alongside deepening insecurity. At the same time, Nigeria’s agricultural budget allocation remains at 2-3% against the African Union’s 10% target. Stakeholders called for evidence on scalable, climate-resilient production systems and accessible financial instruments specifically designed for smallholder, medium-scale, and large-scale farmers.
The Roadmap: First Three Milestones in Nine Months
The launch discussions produced a shared understanding of the strategic priorities the Nigeria Policy Innovation Hub will pursue in its first nine months. The following three milestones represent the most demand-driven, actionable priorities identified across sessions.
Milestone 1: Establishing a co-created, national evidence agenda
The hub will convene a structured working session with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security and other key stakeholders to jointly define the research priorities that will shape the hub’s agenda beyond 2027. This co-creation process will provide a platform for research to be commissioned by and tailored to the needs of policymakers, not produced in isolation from the policy and decision cycles it seeks to influence. The Nigerian Governors’ Forum’s Agriculture Department and the Agriculture Donor Working Group will be engaged as key partners, connecting federal-level priority-setting with the state and subnational realities where policy either takes root or fails silently.
Milestone 2: Integrating Sustainability Framework into Policy Design
Many agrifood system programs and interventions have treated sustainability as the end-of-project question, something to be resolved in the final months before a funding cycle expires, when it is in fact a design-stage answer. In its first nine months, the hub will work to shift this logic by developing a practical sustainability assessment framework that program designers, government ministries, and development partners can apply at the inception of new initiatives, not at their conclusion. The framework will address three interlocking questions that current program architecture routinely defers: whether government ownership is built into the program's structure from the outset, whether the scale ambition is matched by the institutional capacity to sustain it, and whether the exit conditions assumed by donors align with the absorption capacity of the systems they are exiting. This work will be developed through direct consultation with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security and relevant development partners.
Milestone 3: Operationalize gender and youth inclusion frameworks
The launch reaffirmed that inclusion must be designed from the start, not added as an afterthought. In its first nine months, the hub will develop operational frameworks for integrating women and youth from the design stage through to policy engagement activities, not as a parallel workstream but as a structural feature of how the hub operates. This will involve formal partnerships with the Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development's WAVE 774 Program and the Ministry of Youth Development's Youth in Agribusiness Land Trust Fund, both identified at the launch as concrete institutional vehicles for this agenda. The hub will prioritize evidence on financing instruments, value-chain participation models, and measurable grassroots outcomes to support both, recognizing that the sustainability and scale of Nigeria's agricultural transformation depend directly on whether its women and youth are architects of the transformation.
