Nigeria’s Food Systems Convergence Has a Missing Piece: Agrifood Businesses

The room held government officials, development partners, UN agencies, and private sector representatives. What the room did not have, and what these rooms almost never have, is a food processor from Kano, a cassava miller from Abia, or a spice entrepreneur from Benin City.

That absence is not an oversight. It is the structural flaw at the heart of the convergence agenda.

The Convergence Initiative was launched by the UN Deputy Secretary-General at COP28 in 2023 to bridge two global milestones: the UN Secretary-General's Call to Action for Accelerated Food Systems Transformation (UNFSS+2) and the COP28 UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action.

Nigeria's Convergence Initiative grew out of that global launch. The goal is to connect Nigeria's food systems transformation pathways with its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), and turn that alignment into action on the ground.

The frameworks are strong. The NDCs, the NAPs, the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) investment plans, and the National Multi-sectoral Plan of Action for Food and Nutrition (NMPFAN). All call collectively for integrated action on agriculture, climate, and nutrition. On paper, the pieces fit.

The problem is the last mile. Between a ministerial commitment and a farmer's field, between a policy document and a processing factory, sits a huge execution gap. The actors who operate in that gap, the agrifood businesses that actually produce, process, distribute, and sell food, are not formally part of the convergence architecture.

Here is what I believe, and what the evidence supports: a commercially strong agrifood business is not peripheral to food systems convergence. It is the mechanism through which convergence gets delivered.

Consider what an agrifood SME actually does when it operates well. A food processor mops up fresh produce from a smallholder farmer or an aggregator, adds value, and sells it at a premium price. This reduces post-harvest loss, which is simultaneously a greenhouse gas reduction, a nutrition improvement, and an investment return.

A value-added food brand builds market premium on quality and traceability, connecting smallholder producers to higher-value markets while incentivizing climate-smart sourcing. A growth-stage food business that achieves NAFDAC certification and nutrition labelling compliance becomes eligible for development finance, government procurement, and institutional buyers, scaling the impact policy is trying to create.

None of this requires a special climate or nutrition program. It requires a commercially viable business operating in an enabling environment.

That is the convergence argument nobody is making loudly enough. Agrifood businesses are already doing convergence work. We simply have not framed it that way. And because we have not framed it that way, they remain invisible to the policy processes and financing instruments designed to support them.

There is a reason private sector engagement matters beyond the philosophical. Agrifood businesses can deliver outcomes simultaneously that government programs, by design, deliver sequentially.

A food processor who reduces post-harvest loss delivers a climate win: every ton of food saved is emissions avoided from decomposing biomass. A nutrition win: more food reaching consumers means better dietary adequacy at lower cost. An investment win: documented impact on loss reduction creates a bankable case for development finance, impact bonds, and blended finance instruments that specifically require private sector partners to deploy.

No government program achieves all three at once. An agrifood business does it as a byproduct of running well.

Nigeria has an estimated $9 billion in annual post-harvest food losses. At the same time, close to 40 percent of children under five are stunted, according to Nigeria's Demographic and Health Survey, and around 11 million children under five, one in every three, live in severe child food poverty, according to UNICEF's 2024 Child Food Poverty report. These are not separate crises requiring separate programs. They share the same underlying system failure: an agrifood value chain that loses too much, delivers too little nutrition, and attracts too little investment. The businesses positioned to fix that are already operating. They need visibility, intelligence, and access, not new programs.

Impacter Solutions recently collected field evidence from 60 agrifood businesses across 13 states in Nigeria, through two independent instruments. I shared this data at the TWG meeting, and the finding is worth stating plainly here.

Despite severe macroeconomic pressure, with fuel prices affecting 88 percent of respondents, exchange rate volatility affecting 69 percent, and weak customer demand pulling down 53 percent, 75 percent of businesses reported stable or improved performance over the previous 12 months.

The sector is not collapsing. It is adapting.

But here is what matters most for the convergence argument. Every single adaptation these businesses made was reactive. Price increases came after costs had already risen. Supplier switches happened after supply chains had already broken. Stock reductions followed after cash flow had already tightened.

These businesses are resilient, but they are not strategically positioned. They are surviving the system rather than shaping it. The reason is not lack of capability. It is lack of intelligence, access, and institutional visibility. They are not in the room.

Based on these insights, my ask to the TWG was to support four specific changes to the Convergence Action Blueprint (CAB):

1. Name agrifood SMEs specifically as convergence actors. Not as beneficiaries, not subsumed under a multinational-led food chain within the private sector group, not as a footnote. Agrifood businesses should be a defined category with a reporting pathway and a seat in the Convergence Action Group (CAG), reflecting the reality that the large majority of Nigeria's food sector operates informally or semi-formally.
2. Create a private sector Science-Policy-Society Interface (SPSI) pathway. Give agrifood businesses a formal mechanism to document and report climate-nutrition convergence actions, so they become visible to policy processes, investor dashboards, and the CAG review cycle.
3. Embed SME-accessible financing instruments in the post-harvest investment framework. The Post-Harvest Loss Reduction framework cannot serve only large agro-processors. Growth-stage agrifood businesses need instruments they can actually access through the Bank of Agriculture (BOA) and the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL).
4. Reform institutional procurement. School feeding, hospital procurement, and government purchasing should give preference to suppliers with nutrition certification and food safety compliance. This is the fastest market incentive government can deliver, and it costs nothing to design.

The convergence Nigeria needs cannot be government-led alone. Policies align on paper. Donors, development partners, and government ministries, departments and agencies produce roadmaps and coordinate action. But food reaches households through businesses, through the processors, millers, smokers, packagers, and distributors who turn agricultural production into dietary outcomes.

Those businesses are under pressure. They are adapting without intelligence. They are producing without market access. They are building without visibility. Getting them into the room is not a gesture toward private sector inclusion. It is the prerequisite for convergence that actually converges.