IKEJA, LAGOS — May 23 2025 — Digital wholesale platform PricePally wrapped up its two-day PricePally Impact Summit on Thursday with a clear call to harness data and grassroots collaboration to unlock the productivity of Nigeria’s 38 million smallholder farmers.
The summit gathered agritech founders, cooperative leaders, policy makers and financiers in Ikeja from 22–23 May to share tools that can turn fragmented supply chains into resilient food systems. A keynote panel led by Maureen Unugo, Head of Partnerships at market-linkage firm CoAmana, underscored the urgency of building “systems that convert farmers’ hard work into real economic power.”
“We keep telling farmers to ‘scale up,’ yet we rarely give them the digital rails to do so,” Unugo told delegates. “Reliable data, access to fit-for-purpose credit, and climate-smart insurance are the missing gears that translate harvests into wealth—especially for women and youth who are too often left out.”
Sessions examined how satellite imagery and last-mile mobile surveys can forecast yields, reduce post-harvest losses and de-risk lending. Panelists also stressed local ownership of solutions: farmer groups demonstrated how simple USSD menus help them record inventory and negotiate fairer prices, while extension agents showcased community dashboards that flag pest outbreaks in real time.
Summit organizers devoted a track to gender-inclusive innovation, citing studies that farms run by women receive under half the financing of male counterparts. Unugo highlighted CoAmana’s pilot in Kaduna, where bundling micro-loans with crop insurance lifted female farmers’ net incomes by 27 percent. “A sustainable food system must first protect livelihoods,” she said. “When we design for the most excluded, everyone benefits.”
Attendees left with an action plan to deepen private-public partnerships, expand digital literacy programs and pilot outcome-based financing models ahead of the 2026 planting season. If realized, stakeholders agreed, these measures could transform Nigeria’s small farms from survival enterprises into thriving engines of economic growth.