Roundtable: Local Solutions for Nigeria’s Home-Grown School Feeding Program

10 September 2025 · Abuja, Nigeria

Dr. Maryam Habib presented local solutions on nutrient quality, food availability, affordability and sustainability at a roundtable bringing together the National Home-Grown School Feeding Program and the commodity associations and smallholder farmers who supply it.

Dr. Maryam Habib represented Impacter Solutions at a roundtable discussion on 10 September 2025 in Abuja, between the National Program Manager of the National Home-Grown School Feeding Program (NHGSFP), Princess Aderemi Adebowale, and the leadership of commodity associations and smallholder farmers.

The roundtable brought the program’s demand side and its supply side into the same conversation, government on one end, and the farmers and commodity leaders who move food from farm to school plate on the other.

Dr. Maryam’s presentation centred on local solutions to four connected problems facing the program: nutrient quality, food availability, affordability, and sustainability.

The thread running through the discussion was that these four issues cannot be solved separately. A school feeding program that sources locally has to solve for nutrition, supply reliability, and cost at the same time, and the smallholder farmers and commodity associations in the room are the ones positioned to deliver on all three, provided the right technical support and market linkages are in place.

The NHGSFP is one of the largest structured food demand channels in the country, and it runs through smallholder farmers and local commodity supply chains. Strengthening that link, on quality, on volume, on price, is direct market-building work for the agrifood businesses Impacter Solutions supports.

Better days are ahead for Nigeria’s National Home-Grown School Feeding Program. We look forward to a successful implementation ahead.

Impacter Solutions supports agrifood SMEs across Nigeria and Africa to build stronger businesses, access markets and finance, and grow as nutrition-informed enterprises.