Demand Signal Explorer

The ACReSAL project mid-term review reports 922,717.86 hectares of land brought under restoration so far, against a backdrop where an estimated 70 million people in Nigeria face desertification pressure. The project's vegetation cover has increased by 3.6% in covered areas. With the project currently active in 19 of 36 states, there is a clear case for continuing and expanding land restoration investment to reach the remaining exposed states and populations.

The ACReSAL (Agro-Climatic Resilience in Semi-Arid Landscapes) project currently covers 19 of Nigeria's 36 states, reaching 9.3 million direct beneficiaries (9.3 million farmer beneficiaries) with 48.9% women's participation. Given the scale of the underlying problem — desertification affecting an estimated 70 million people — there is a clear program-level case for extending coverage to additional states with similar agro-climatic vulnerability.

The ACReSAL project has planned 774 soil health laboratories as part of its agricultural and climate resilience infrastructure investment. Soil health labs are a foundational input for climate-smart agriculture advisory (fertilizer recommendations, soil management), and the scale planned (774 units) signals a significant infrastructure investment gap being addressed across the 19 covered states.

ACReSAL has developed 25,298 hectares of irrigated area, while 79.1% of beneficiary households report improved water access (implying a remaining gap of roughly 20.9% of households without improved access) and 965 solar-powered boreholes have been drilled. Despite these gains, 72.7% of beneficiaries report higher crop yields and 82.2% report increased income — indicating that further irrigation and water-access investment would continue to translate directly into productivity and income gains.

ACReSAL reports 9,659 women have gained secure land access through the project, alongside a 48.9% overall women's participation rate. Secure land tenure for women is a recognized binding constraint on agricultural investment and productivity in Nigeria; the relatively modest absolute number (9,659 women) against a 9.3 million-beneficiary program suggests land-tenure formalization for women remains a small fraction of overall program activity and a candidate for scaling.

The ACReSAL program reports a NGN 50 billion green bond issued to support agricultural and climate resilience investment, alongside 20 strategic catchment management plans developed across covered states. This represents a concrete, replicable climate-finance instrument that could be scaled to fund additional restoration, irrigation, and catchment management activity in states beyond the current 19.

Nigeria produced an estimated 4.5 million metric tons of paddy rice in 2023 with a self-sufficiency rate of approximately 60%, meaning roughly 40% of national rice consumption still depends on imports. Given that rice is a staple consumed by 600+ million people across Africa with consumption growing 6% per year, closing Nigeria's self-sufficiency gap represents a major production and value-chain investment opportunity tied to AfricaRice's varietal release and seed system work in-country (15+ AfricaRice-involved varieties released in Nigeria).

Kenya produced an estimated 130,000 metric tons of paddy rice in 2023 against an import dependency of approximately 70% of consumption — among the highest import-reliance ratios reported for AfricaRice's focus countries. AfricaRice-KALRO joint varieties (5+ released) and a 16,000-hectare irrigated lowland rice area (Mwea, Ahero, West Kano, Bunyala, Tana Delta, Hola) provide an existing production base; smallholder yields average 4-5 t/ha irrigated vs 2-3 t/ha rainfed, indicating room to close the gap through irrigation expansion and adoption of improved varieties.

AfricaRice's Nigeria Youth in Rice Agribusiness Program, active in the Niger Delta and North-East states, trained 500+ youth agripreneurs in 2023 and has supported 200+ parboiling enterprises in Nigeria, where women make up 60-80% of the rice post-harvest labor force (against an organization-wide target of 40% female beneficiaries). The relatively small absolute numbers (500+ youth, 200+ enterprises) against Nigeria's overall rice sector scale (4.5 million MT production, 60% self-sufficiency) point to a clear opportunity to scale youth- and women-focused rice agribusiness programming.

AfricaRice has deployed auto CO2-generating hermetic storage cocoons in 5+ countries, achieving 30-50% post-harvest loss reduction in pilot areas. Given that Nigeria (60% self-sufficient, 4.5M MT production) and Kenya (70% import-dependent) both face production gaps that post-harvest losses worsen, expanding hermetic storage deployment in these two countries' rice-growing areas represents a relatively low-cost lever to improve effective supply without new land or irrigation investment.

One Acre Fund's 2025 Annual Report profiles Keziah Danjuma Ubandoma, a 24-year-old woman farmer in Pyatta Village, Nigeria, whose education was cut short by financial hardship and who turned to farming to build financial independence. The report states that across sub-Saharan Africa, women make up roughly half of the agricultural workforce yet face steeper challenges than men, 'from limited land rights to a lack of startup capital.' One Acre Fund's response — introductory credit sizes, group loans aligned with cultural norms, and oral/pictorial training for all literacy levels — is itself evidence that mainstream financial and land-tenure systems are not adequately serving women farmers like Keziah, representing a persistent demand for women-targeted credit, training, and land-access products in Nigeria.

One Acre Fund reports it remained Africa's largest purchaser of crop insurance on behalf of smallholders in 2025, covering 1.5 million clients against extreme weather events, and continued developing 'One Acre Fund Re' — a not-for-profit reinsurance facility that in 2025 helped lower premiums and strengthen coverage for farmers in Kenya and Malawi specifically. The explicit framing of OAF as 'Africa's largest purchaser' of such insurance signals that smallholder-level crop insurance coverage remains far below need across its full Kenya client base (1,255,000 farmers in 2025), with the reinsurance facility representing an active, scalable mechanism to extend coverage further.

One Acre Fund's full-service program served 2 million farmers in 2025, a slight decrease from 2024, which the report attributes partly to the Kenyan government's continued fertilizer subsidy program: 'In Kenya, the government has continued its fertilizer subsidy program; this has reduced demand for our own input offerings, prompting us to explore new channels for impact.' This is a direct, named example of a public subsidy program crowding out a private/NGO input-delivery channel, indicating a need to better coordinate public subsidy design with private-sector input delivery in Kenya so that both channels reinforce rather than displace each other.

One Acre Fund classifies Zambia as a 'Start-Up Market' with only 20,000 partnership farmers (Partnerships: 20,000), and explicitly states that 'In Zambia, our agroforestry-based carbon credit trial is our main program' — with farm-input credit available only to farmers enrolled in the carbon program, and not all of those farmers choosing to take up input credit. This indicates Zambia's agroforestry/carbon-credit model is still at an early, trial stage relative to OAF's mature markets (e.g. Rwanda at 2.3 million farmers, Kenya at 1.26 million), representing a clear scale-up opportunity for climate-finance-linked agroforestry programming in Zambia.

The 2024 FinAccess Household Survey finds that rural youth account for 45.5% of Kenya's financially excluded population — the single largest excluded segment. This points to a clear, quantified gap for youth-focused financial products (savings, credit, mobile money) in rural areas, distinct from urban or older-population exclusion patterns.

The survey identifies Turkana, West Pokot, and similar counties as having the highest financial exclusion rates in Kenya, in sharp contrast to Kiambu, Nairobi, and other counties with the highest inclusion rates. This county-level disparity is a directly actionable targeting signal for financial-sector development programs, donor investment, and mobile-money/agent-network expansion.

The 2024 FinAccess Household Survey includes an explicit policy recommendation to improve the terms of the Hustler Fund (Kenya's government-backed micro-loan scheme). This is a named, government-run credit program flagged for terms improvement based on survey evidence of borrower experience — an actionable policy-level demand signal distinct from general credit-access gaps.

The survey finds that 9.8% of mobile money users in Kenya reported losing money due to service downtime. Given mobile money's central role in Kenya's financial system (the most widely used financial access channel nationally), a loss rate of nearly 1 in 10 users represents a material consumer-protection gap with direct implications for trust in digital financial services and for regulatory oversight of mobile network operators and payment providers.

The survey finds that only about 260,000 agricultural users hold agricultural insurance, out of 1.77 million total insurance users in Kenya (2024) — meaning agricultural insurance represents roughly 14.7% of total insurance uptake despite agriculture being a dominant livelihood activity for rural households. This is a significant under-penetration given Kenya's exposure to drought and erratic rainfall, and represents a clear scaling opportunity for weather-indexed or input-linked agricultural insurance products.

The survey finds rural solar adoption (25.1%) is more than double urban solar adoption (10.0%), yet only about 27% of solar purchases are loan-financed — meaning the majority of rural solar uptake is happening through cash purchase or other means rather than credit. Given the higher rural adoption rate already achieved without much financing support, expanding credit products for solar (e.g. pay-as-you-go, asset financing) could accelerate further adoption, particularly relevant for off-grid agricultural and household energy needs.