In Nigeria, farmers often use traditional stone grinding methods to process their grains and groundnuts. However, these approaches are time- and energy-consuming and often result in food losses, leaving the farmer with less food to sell and/or consume at the household level. Fortunately, low-cost technologies for threshing, winnowing, and grading are becoming more readily available in Nigeria, but farmers have not fully adopted them.

USAID Advancing Nutrition is building on existing successes in food processing in Northern Nigeria, especially on the support provided by the USAID Feed the Future Rural Resilience Activity to enhance availability and adoption of these on-farm processing technologies. Specifically, we support increased linkages among the Government of Nigeria’s Agriculture Development Programme (ADP), extension agents, lead farmers, and producer groups to bring local farmers and mechanization service providers together to facilitate technology adoption. We also use these activities as a capacity strengthening opportunity for ADP and the extension agents. Through on-the-job mentoring, they are learning how they can organize producers and the private sector in their catchment areas to increase access to these technologies moving forward, which is a priority for the Federal Ministry for Agriculture and Rural Development. This activity is expected to increase the availability of important staple crops, such as maize, cowpea, millet, sorghum, and rice, by reducing food loss during processing. It is also expected to raise incomes by increasing the quantity of food farmers have available to sell, which can then in turn be used to purchase food or put toward health care.