How Nigeria’s Forgotten Farmers Feed a Nation That Refuses to Finance Them

Hauwa rises before the Adamawa sky turns orange. She tends two hectares of rice, checks the soil her father farmed before her, and says a quiet prayer that this season’s harvest covers what she borrowed from her neighbour at interest rates no bank regulator would ever sanction. The big banks have never once called her name. No Certificate of Occupancy, no collateral, no formal business title; just the earth beneath her feet and the food she grows for a country of over 220 million souls.

That picture is not an exception in northern Nigeria. It is the rule. And behind it sits one of the most expensive policy failures the Nigerian state has quietly sustained for generations.

Nigeria’s agricultural sector expanded by 4.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025, a sharp improvement from 2.54 percent in the same period of 2024, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Agriculture contributed 25.67 percent to nominal GDP in the fourth quarter of 2025. The food is growing. The money is not following. Although accounting for less than 4 percent of total bank credit to the private sector, the agricultural sector recorded an increase of 86.73 percent in its total debt to deposit money banks as of September 2025. That growth in debt is not a sign of progress; it is a sign of desperation.

Meanwhile, 33.1 million Nigerians are expected to face high levels of acute food insecurity during the 2025 lean season, driven by economic hardship, the effects of climate change, and persistent violence in the northeastern states, according to the Cadre Harmonisé analysis supported by WFP and the Federal Government. Across Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states alone, 5.1 million people are projected to face food insecurity at Crisis Phase 3 and above during the 2025 lean season. The farmers feeding the rest of the country are themselves going hungry.

The people growing Nigeria’s food cannot access Nigeria’s money. That gap is not a data point. It is a policy failure with a human face.

A System That Was Never Built for Hauwa

The exclusion of smallholder farmers from formal credit is structural, and the evidence has been stacking up long enough to embarrass every administration that walked past it. CBN Governor Olayemi Cardoso acknowledged in December 2025 that smallholders contribute roughly 90 percent of the country’s agricultural output but remain financially excluded due to inadequate collateral, poor credit records, and limited formal banking access. The governor made this admission at the relaunch of the Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme Fund, describing it as “a new dawn,” a phrase Nigerians have heard before in different mouths and different years.

Despite employing almost two-thirds of Nigeria’s labour force and contributing more than 20 percent to national GDP, agriculture currently receives less than five percent of total bank lending, the CBN governor confirmed at the same event. Those numbers have barely shifted in two decades of policy announcements.

The reasons are structural and interlocking. On the supply side, inadequate collateral is the key constraint, with supply-side policies needing to focus on enhancing smallholders’ capacity to possess bankable collateral such as land titles or assets. The problem, as researchers drawing on NBS Living Standards Measurement Survey data have long established, is that most of that land carries no formal title at all; and no title means no loan. Financial institutions are generally risk-averse, often perceiving agriculture as a high-risk sector due to unpredictable weather, pest infestations, and persistent insecurity, which compounds an already broken access equation.

The federal government’s response has been, to put it plainly, expensive and inadequate. In the 2025 budget, the federal government allocated ₦826.5 billion to agriculture, a significant increase from the ₦362.94 billion allocated in 2024; but this figure represents only about 1.5 percent of the total approved budget, far below the 10 percent target Nigeria agreed to under the 2003 Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security, a commitment the country has never met.

The Anchor Borrowers Programme, the flagship CBN intervention of recent years, has been widely documented as a failure. The World Bank noted concerns about adverse borrower selection, funds diversion, low recovery rates, poor programme design, and market distortions, issues that led the CBN under Governor Cardoso to halt intervention programmes. The money left Abuja. Farmers like Hauwa never saw it.

Now, the federal government has approved a N250 billion financing facility for the Bank of Agriculture to expand access to affordable credit for smallholder farmers, providing loans at single-digit interest rates; and in September 2025, the Bank of Agriculture secured a one billion dollar intervention fund in partnership with the African Export-Import Bank to strengthen agricultural value chains. These are not nothing. But they are promises, and the Northeast has heard promises echo before. Widespread Crisis IPC Phase 3 outcomes are expected through May 2026 across Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states, as persisting insecurity has reduced agricultural engagement, disrupted market systems, and other typical livelihood activities.

E don reach breaking point. The question is who is actually building the bridge, not announcing it.

The Man Who Built What Government Promised

Dr. Asongo Abraham Iorkaa, a Financial Inclusion, Climate Smart Financing & Impact Assessment Specialist and the Co-Founder of the Jaress Agfinance Ltd, did not arrive at agricultural finance through a conference room or a policy circular. He was shaped by it before he had words for what he was watching.

“I grew up as a farmer, and my mom was a farmer,” he told The Gazette in Yola. “I watched firsthand how she suffered. Sometimes we borrowed inputs at very high cost and unfortunately the farm was not good, and there was no training for her, no access to finance. So when I had the experience in financial inclusion and the opportunity to set up Jaress, our mission was that millions of women like my mom must be given attention.”

That mission became Jaress Agricultural Finance Limited, a microfinance institution founded in June 2024 and headquartered in Yola, Adamawa State. Within its first operational year, it had opened branches in Hong, Song, Taraba, and Benue states. Loan officers work inside farming communities, not behind counters; a deliberate rejection of everything that has made formal finance inaccessible to women like Hauwa for generations.

The model closes every gap in the chain simultaneously. Where banks demand collateral, Jaress runs group lending, a cooperative structure in which members cross-guarantee each other’s loans. Where input markets flood rural Adamawa with counterfeit fertiliser and adulterated herbicide, Jaress has signed supply agreements with certified organic providers through a memorandum of understanding with Herbit in Yola. Where middlemen historically arrived at the farm gate with exploitative pricing, Jaress locks in off-take agreements with buyers before planting begins.

“We close the gap by solving the problem of access to finance, good inputs given to the farmers, and then creating market,” Dr. Asongo said. “It is a closed-loop kind of operation.”

The numbers are hard to argue with, especially against the backdrop of federal programme failures. Jaress reports a non-performing loan ratio of 2 percent against the CBN’s benchmark maximum of 5 percent for microfinance institutions; which means a 98 percent recovery rate inside communities where nationally backed schemes crumbled. For an institution in its second year of operation, working across territory that private capital has long declared too risky, that figure is not just impressive. It is instructive.

One number, though, defines the institution’s soul more than any other. 95 percent of Jaress borrowers are women.

“Women carry more burden,” Dr. Asongo said. “If you finance a woman and she is successful, the whole family is successful. We deliberately focus on women.”

Across communities in Adamawa, Taraba, and Benue, women who had never stood inside a formal bank branch are now accessing certified organic inputs, getting their harvests aggregated for premium off-taker prices, and insuring their crops against the flooding that devastated the region in 2025. According to FEWS NET’s October 2025 Food Security Outlook, approximately 761,000 hectares of cropland were flooded across the ten most affected states between June and October 2025, including Adamawa and Taraba; and Jaress farmers, backed by crop insurance, had a safety net that uninsured neighbours did not.

Dr. Asongo is equally clear-eyed about the security narrative that has kept institutional money away from the Northeast. “The issue of insecurity is over-emphasised in media,” he said. “We operate virtually across all 21 local governments of Adamawa State. Insecurity has never hindered our operations. Our repayment has been very effective.”

A 98 percent recovery rate is not the profile of a region too volatile for investment. It is the profile of a region too long abandoned by institutions that mistook their discomfort for an objective risk assessment.

The accountability question is sharp and it is overdue. Nigeria has spent billions across two decades on agricultural intervention programmes, from the ACGSF to the Anchor Borrowers Programme to the newly announced N250 billion Bank of Agriculture facility. The documented results have fallen consistently short of what was promised at launch. Dr. Asongo Abraham is not a minister. He is a private citizen, shaped by his mother’s poverty, who built with his own vision what seventeen years of federal programmes and decades of CBN policy circulars could not.

“Most of the government programs are very beautiful on paper, very beautiful on television,” he said. “But when you go down to the grassroots, these things do not get there.”

The CBN, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, and the Bank of Agriculture did not respond to requests for comment from The Gazette as of press time.

For the woman in Hong who now clears two hectares instead of one, for the farmer in Mubi who no longer gambles on counterfeit herbicide, for the cooperative in Taraba whose rice already has a buyer before it is planted, Jaress is not a microfinance institution in the textbook sense. It is the banking system finally doing what it was always supposed to do.

The October 2025 Cadre Harmonisé analysis projects that food insecurity in Nigeria will worsen significantly during the June to August 2026 lean season, with Adamawa State named as a primary focus for emergency response. Hunger is accelerating. The announcements are multiplying. And somewhere between the two, a man who watched his mother suffer is already in the field, loan book open, recovery rate intact, waiting for the government’s beautiful papers to catch up with his ugly, necessary reality.

The food was always growing in the Northeast. Nigeria just needs the money to finally follow it home.