Estimating food production changes and project monitoring and evaluation in Nigeria

Agriculture is the most important sector in the Nigerian economy after oil. Food production, however, has failed to keep pace with population growth, and with the fall in oil prices the country has been forced into a programme of austerity. A series of agricultural development programmes which were started in the mid-1970s, attempted to lay the foundation for increased food production, and the Food Production Plan formulated in 1980 set out a coordinated strategy for at least narrowing the ‘food gap’ over a five-year period.

The importance of monitoring and evaluating agricultural programmes in Nigeria has been stressed from the outset, but in spite of the massive resources devoted to this effort it has not proved possible to devise an effective means of measuring incremental crop production. There are many reasons for this: in part it is due to the complexity of the agricultural production system, the effect of exogenous variables and the initial weak data base. However, the survey approach, particularly in the early period, was inappropriate. The projects themselves have not been an unqualified success, and the main fault lies in the failure to create adequate institutional linkages with government agencies to ensure continuity of the development process. The Nigerian Government and the principal external funding agency, the World Bank, have recognised this problem and a new ‘agricultural sector’ approach is now being adopted.

This has presented monitoring and evaluation practitioners with a new challenge to devise a more cost-effective means of collecting and disseminating information on key parameters, particularly food production, and to achieve the correct balance between the needs of management for ‘monitoring’ information and the longer term ‘evaluation’ requirements. There is a need, therefore, to reappraise the methods employed in the estimation of food production, and new techniques such as low-level aerial photography which have shown promise should be further tested. Finally, some measure of well-being in the target groups needs to be developed over and above the estimation of physical crop production increases.