In 2019, as Nigeria deepened its commitment to agricultural modernization under the Agricultural Promotion Policy (APP) and prepared its food systems for population surges projected by the UN, experts warned that increased production alone wouldn’t guarantee food security. Nigeria needed not just more food but smarter, fairer systems to grow, distribute, and manage it.
Amid this nationwide rethink, a quiet shift was taking place not driven by large institutions, but by determined individuals and community-based thinkers working at the intersection of labor, land, data, and human rights.
One such contributor, Obunadike ThankGod Chiamaka, exemplifies a class of emerging reformers whose interdisciplinary grounding and social consciousness reflected a broader change in how food systems are being reimagined across the country.
A System Under Pressure
By 2019, Nigeria was importing over ₦1.3 trillion worth of food annually while simultaneously facing internal displacements in Benue, Plateau, and Borno States that strained local production.
Major food crops like rice and maize suffered supply chain inconsistencies, exacerbated by post-harvest losses and weak rural infrastructure.
The government’s initiatives, ranging from the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme to the National Livestock Transformation Plan had noble intentions but often stumbled at implementation, especially in communities with limited access to information or formal institutions.
This is where grassroots reformers, armed with local knowledge and adaptive management skills, began to fill the gap.
Youth, Data, and Invisible Infrastructure
In many ways, Nigeria’s agriculture sector is burdened not only by physical infrastructure deficits but also by information and personnel management gaps.
Many smallholder farmers lack access to organized labor data, cooperative platforms, or early warning systems for crop failure or price fluctuations.
This lack of structure isn’t simply a technical issue it reflects deep systemic exclusion, particularly among women and youth farmers.
Professionals like Obunadike, who earned a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Relations and Personnel Management from Osun State University in 2015, understood early that agriculture must be managed like a workforce-intensive enterprise.
Her academic training, though not directly rooted in agronomy, focused on optimizing human capital, streamlining organizational structures, and improving institutional accountability skills sorely needed across Nigeria’s agricultural extension and rural development sectors.
By 2016, Obunadike was already working in southwest Nigeria with cooperative societies and local government departments to help farmers document their land-use rights, labor contributions, and access to farm inputs.
These weren’t top-down interventions; they were community-designed engagements, built through focus groups, mobile-based data collection, and participatory accountability exercises.
Aligning With National Conversation
Her grassroots contributions aligned meaningfully with the 2019 National Agricultural Show, themed “Agriculture: The Key to Industrialization,” and the Federal Ministry of Agriculture’s 2019 advisory calling for improved land governance and data transparency.
While most of the media focused on billion-naira investments or tractor import figures, little attention was given to the human and governance layers of food production precisely the gap Obunadike and others sought to address.
Across Osun, Ekiti, and Kwara States, she collaborated with youth groups and informal cooperatives to develop small data registries that could track input distribution, fertilizer delays, land conflicts, and training program outcomes.
These systems still in rudimentary stages by 2018 provided the foundation for more equitable planning by community-based organizations.
Bridging Gender Gaps in the Value Chain
A core part of Nigeria’s agricultural challenge is the persistent gender inequality in access to resources. While women contribute over 70% of farm labor in some regions, they control less than 10% of land and receive under 15% of agricultural extension services.
Obunadike’s field work helped bring these gaps to light in local councils through participatory workshops and anonymized equity audits.
These findings didn’t just sit in notebooks they were used by civil society partners to improve farmer targeting for subsidy programs, and informed policy dialogues held by NGOs like the Civil Society Coalition on Sustainable Agriculture (CISCSA) and IFAD-backed community development platforms in the southwest.
Not an Outlier, but Part of a Movement
Obunadike was far from alone. Across the country, a new generation of technically grounded, socially aware Nigerians was reshaping food systems from the bottom up. In Kano, technologists were building inventory traceability apps for rice mills.
In Cross River, women’s cooperatives were piloting data-driven land mapping. And in Nasarawa, local developers were experimenting with SMS-based yield prediction alerts using rainfall pattern data.
The ecosystem was coalescing. Obunadike’s unique value was in integrating people management theory with rural food systems, building not just digital solutions but trust, participation, and localized governance models.
Her work caught the attention of policy influencers, and by 2018 she was advising youth reintegration projects exploring how to transition unemployed graduates into agri-enterprise roles.
Her reports emphasized that productivity gains could not be sustainable without investment in data literacy, gender inclusion, and institutional trust among farmers.
Grounded in Nigeria’s Realities
Unlike many imported policy models that assume stable governance and infrastructure, Obunadike’s approach was realistically grounded in Nigerian constraints.
She recognized that local government offices might lack internet access or stable electricity and so helped communities design tools that worked offline, or used simple mobile phones.
Her teams conducted “data walk-throughs” in communities, empowering farmers to challenge opaque input distribution and fertilizer allocation processes.
Her participatory grievance logging tools in Ilesha, for instance, allowed local women farmers to document when and where they were bypassed for trainings or inputs, contributing to better oversight by community councils.
This approach was deeply aligned with the UN’s SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and entirely Nigerian in its design.
2019 Climate and Land Use Tensions
2019 was also a year of increasing land use conflict and climate stress in Nigeria. Flooding in Niger and Kogi displaced thousands, while farmer-herder clashes in the middle belt tested the limits of traditional agriculture.
The Presidency’s National Food Security Council, chaired by President Buhari, announced strategies focused on input support and commercial farming zones but many questioned whether they addressed the grassroots governance and transparency issues driving inequities.
Obunadike’s work, though smaller in scale, provided exactly this missing layer giving farmers a sense of voice, participation, and monitoring power in shaping local food systems. It offered an institutional alternative to politicized subsidy delivery, unmonitored extension contracts, and opaque cooperative governance.
Recognition and the Road Ahead
While not yet a household name in 2019, Obunadike was increasingly seen by agricultural civil society organizations as a bridge-builder between policy and practice.
Her labor-centric framing of agriculture provided an important counterweight to purely mechanistic or investment-driven models. And her early fieldwork helped develop frameworks for farmer accountability, input monitoring, and community co-design that later formed the basis for scalable digital platforms.
As Nigeria looks beyond 2019 toward integrating AI, drone monitoring, and digital agriculture platforms, the country would do well to remember the contributions of grassroots innovators like her who laid the groundwork quietly, diligently, and always with the rural producer in mind.
