Climate variability continues to affect agricultural productivity in Nigeria, with implications for food security and smallholder livelihoods. In response, the Sasakawa Africa Association is currently implementing the “Evidence-Based Regenerative Agriculture to Address Climate Change in Africa” project in Nigeria and Benin. The initiative, which began in 2022, is coordinated by the SAA Nigeria office and is funded by the African Development Bank through the Japan Policy and Human Resources Development Grant.
In this interview, Dr Godwin Atser, Country Director, SAA, sheds more light on climate-related challenges affecting farmers in Nigeria and the implementation of regenerative agriculture practices under the project. He also shares practical insights from Nigeria and Benin and considerations for scaling similar approaches within Nigeria

For many years, farming activities in Nigeria were planned around seasons, and farmers recorded bountiful harvests. But today, while farmers still follow the seasons, they complain about the outcomes. What are the climate issues affecting farmers in Nigeria?

The biggest climate challenge confronting farmers now is the disruption of planting and field management activities as a result of unpredictable seasons. Rainfall patterns no longer follow historical trends. We now witness extreme weather events like late onset, early cessation, prolonged dry spells, and extremely heavy downpours. For example, in 2012, 2022 and some years after, Nigeria experienced severe floods that destroyed thousands of hectares of farmland. In Northern Nigeria currently, heavy rains and erosion are causing land degradation and reducing soil fertility. To make matters worse, temperatures in the country are increasing. Data from NIMET has shown that over the past few decades, there has been an average annual increase of 0.8°C. Places like Borno, Sokoto, and Kano now witness temperatures close to 45 °C. So, high temperatures have increased heat stress on crops, livestock and even farmers themselves. This is in addition to the increasing pressure of pests and diseases. So, the consequence of all these is that crop yields have reduced while production risks have increased.

“Do you believe environmental factors in Nigeria have made farming a matter of fate, or is there a viable, practical approach for farmers to adapt to climate change? What would that look like?

Well, it is not a matter of fate. It is a matter of adaptation. The climate is changing. Farmers also need to change their practices accordingly. One of the most practical and sustainable approaches is regenerative agriculture, which basically helps to rebuild soil health. Some regenerative agriculture practices include mulching, cover cropping, reduced tillage, integrated soil fertility management, crop diversification, Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) and agroforestry. These practices help rebuild soil health, reduce erosion, enhance biodiversity, and reduce the risks associated with crop failure.

Given your advocacy for regenerative agriculture, what strategies would you recommend for educating rural Nigerian farmers who have limited formal literacy?

Formal literacy is important, but it is not all that matters because farmers generally learn best by seeing results rather than reading manuals. So, at Sasakawa, in line with our motto, we walk with the farmer by focusing on demonstration, participation, and peer learning. Across the states we work in, we establish Community Demonstration Plots (CDPs) with regenerative agriculture practices and let farmers compare them with conventional methods. When farmers see improvements in crop performance and reduced input costs on these plots, they make a switch. These plots are our farmer learning platforms where we guide farmers through the actual implementation of practices such as mulching, cover cropping, composting, and other practices. We also leverage lead farmers and community-based facilitators. This works because we found that farmers are often more likely to trust and adopt innovations promoted by fellow farmers who have successfully implemented them than by experts. So, in summary, the strongest strategy is “seeing is believing”.

Could you please elaborate on what you mean by regenerative agriculture practices?

From the word “regenerative”, you can infer that Regenerative agriculture practices are approaches that restore and improve the natural resources on which we practice agriculture. These natural resources are the soil, water and biodiversity. As mentioned earlier, some of them include: reduced tillage, cover cropping, mulching, compost application, crop rotation, intercropping, integrated crop-livestock systems, and agroforestry, which is the integration of trees with crops and livestock. Mulching involves covering the soil surface with organic or inorganic materials to retain moisture, regulate temperature, and suppress the growth of weeds. Compost application means adding decomposed organic matter to provide a rich source of slow-release nutrients, while cover cropping involves planting specific, non-harvested crops primarily to protect the soil from erosion. Intercropping involves cultivating two or more crop species simultaneously in the same field to maximize resource use efficiency and enhance biodiversity. Reduced tillage, on the other hand, is about minimising mechanical tillage to preserve soil structure, protect soil organisms, and reduce erosion. The goal of all these regenerative practices, including the ones I have not mentioned, is to keep the soil covered, maintain living roots in the ground, increase organic matter, reduce soil disturbance and enhance biological activity in the soil.

How did the idea come about? Has it been practised elsewhere, and what successes were recorded?

If you look at the practices I mentioned, you’ll discover that regenerative agriculture is not entirely a new idea. It is simply a scientific upgrading of indigenous, traditional farming systems. Let’s take mulching and reduced tillage for example. In those days, indigenous African farming communities rarely left the soil bare. They cleared land manually without heavy soil movements, and the crop residues left behind protected the soil against heavy rains and the scorching sun. Pastoralists also had a symbiotic relationship with farmers because, as animals grazed on post-harvest stubble, their droppings served as manure that naturally fertilised the fields for the next planting season. However, farmers began to shift away from these practices during the Green Revolution era, when traditional farming was industrialised to meet growing demand and fight hunger. That era prioritised high-yielding crop varieties, heavy tillage, massive irrigation systems and heavy reliance on agrochemicals to protect crops and accelerate growth. Farmers also adopted intensive mechanical tillage and massive irrigation systems. All that went on until the 1980s, when scientists, farmers, and environmentalists started to worry about soil degradation and biodiversity loss. There was also concerns about the long-term sustainability of the conventional farming systems because synthetic inputs became increasingly expensive for farmers. They had to use more fertilisers every year to get something out of the degraded soils. Those issues forced us to start thinking of regenerating or reclaiming our soils. Today, Regenerative Agriculture has evolved into a globally recognised approach to sustainable agriculture. It is being practised across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. In countries such as the United States, Brazil, and Australia, farmers have reported improvements in soil organic matter, water retention, biodiversity, and farm resilience to droughts and extreme weather events. In Kenya, Zambia, and Malawi, farmers have recorded increased crop productivity, improved soil fertility, and greater resilience to climate shocks as a result of agroforestry-based regenerative practices.

In what ways are you personally contributing to the growth of agriculture in Nigeria?

I have spent more than 18 years in various leadership positions driving agricultural transformation, food systems development, institutional growth, and strategic partnerships across Africa. As the Country Director of Sasakawa Africa Association in Nigeria, I provide strategic leadership for multi-state and regional interventions and drive resource mobilization and policy engagement. A major challenge with agricultural development is the sustainability of interventions and sometimes the lack of funds to promote technologies that help farmers. So, over the years, I have helped to mobilize more than $65 million in development financing from institutions such as the Gates Foundation, World Bank, African Development Bank (AfDB), Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Programme (WFP), and national governments. I spent a good number of my years working at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), where I provided strategic leadership across project management, institutional partnerships, business development, innovation scaling, digital agriculture, knowledge management, and stakeholder engagement on large-scale donor-funded programmes across Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Benin Republic, Tanzania and Rwanda. But in one sentence, I’ll say my contributions have influenced agricultural policy and investment decisions through strategic engagement with national governments and development finance institutions.

Have you faced any challenges trying to introduce regenerative agriculture in Nigeria?

Of course, promoting regenerative agriculture in Nigeria comes with several challenges, and Sasakawa Africa had to deal with many of them. One of them is the limited availability of extension services and technical support. Currently, we have 1 extension agent for 10,000 farming households in Nigeria. This is a huge gap undermining efficient extension service delivery, including regenerative agriculture. We need effective extension services to create awareness and understanding by demonstrating and guiding farmers through the concept of regenerative agriculture. This is why we are adopting innovative solutions for agricultural extension across our programmes, using digital extension. We’re also supporting the states’ extension services in the states we work by training their extension agents and turning lead farmers and Agric-passionate young people into Community-Based Facilitators and Commodity Association Trainers (CATs). Another challenge is that there is a time lag between adoption and the visible benefits of regenerative agriculture. The benefits of some regenerative agriculture practices are not immediate, but they surely deliver significant long-term benefits. So, the challenge here is that we often encounter farmers who want to quickly reap the economic benefits of the technologies they are introduced to. But it is important to note that despite these challenges, the response from farmers and other value chain actors has generally been encouraging. The lesson we’ve learnt is that successful promotion of regenerative agriculture requires patience, demonstration, and continuous farmer engagement.

Could you share some case studies or feedback from people who have successfully implemented this?

Sasakawa Africa Association receives funds from primarily the Nippon Foundation to support our work in Africa. That funding has been going on in the last 34 years, and has helped us to impact significantly on the lives of farmers. For instance, between 2019 and 2025, farmers in the six states (Kano, Gombe, Benue, Nasarawa, Kwara and Jigawa) where we implemented our core programmes adopted practices such as crop rotation, mulching, intercropping, and reduced tillage. The results were remarkable: rice yields increased by 95%, maize by 88%, and cassava by 29%. At the same time, soil erosion declined by 74%, and vulnerability to dry spells and early cessation of rainfall was reduced significantly. These figures show that regenerative agriculture is helping our farmers become more productive and more resilient to climate change.

Do you currently have government backing, and is it something you actually require?

Yes, government support is very important to our work and it has been one of the foundations of our success in Nigeria. Since commencing operations in Nigeria in 1992, the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA) has maintained strong partnerships with both the Federal and State Governments. We implement our interventions in close collaboration with government agricultural extension systems. Today, SAA operates in more than 21 states across Nigeria, enjoying strong support from the Federal Government, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, state governments and relevant ministries. In several states, including Gombe, Jigawa, Kano and others, governments have provided counterpart funding and technical collaboration to support our programmes. A notable example is the Kano State Agropastoral Development Project, which we successfully implemented with funding support from the Kano State Government. While our core funding comes from The Nippon Foundation of Japan and other international development partners, government partnership remains crucial. Apart from implementing projects, we deliberately invest in strengthening public extension systems so that the knowledge, technologies, and innovations introduced through our interventions can continue to benefit farmers long after project funding has ended. At our last Annual stakeholder meeting in Abuja, the Federal Ministry of Livestock Development invited us to explore areas of collaboration to transform Nigeria’s livestock sector. Several other ministries and state governments have expressed interest in partnering with us. This is an indication of the recognition we enjoy across government institutions. So, to answer the question directly: yes, we enjoy strong government backing, and that support remains indispensable. Agricultural development at scale cannot be driven by development organisations alone. It requires a strong partnership between the government, development partners, the private sector, and farming communities.

Having extended your campaign to Benin Republic, what preliminary data or practical observations have you gathered in comparison to Nigeria?

Our campaign in Benin is under an intervention called Improving Rice Productivity by Decarbonizing Cultivation for 12,000 Hectares of Irrigated Paddy Fields. It is funded by the Policy and Human Resources Development Grant (PHRDG) of Japan through the African Development Bank (AfDB). In the last three years, we have introduced a suite of regenerative practices backed by scientific analysis and AI-powered e-Kakashi technology. Data gathered have shown that smart water and nutrient management significantly reduces Green House Gas (GHG) emissions while increasing yields. What most farmers did in the past was to broadcast chemical fertilisers (including urea) on their rice fields. Urea that was not taken up by the plants ended up vaporising to the atmosphere and increasing the levels of GHG. We have dealt with that by introducing the use of urea super granules, which are placed directly between rice seedlings to increase nutrient uptake and prevent nutrients vaporisation.This improved nutrient uptake while reducing pollution. We also introduced another Regenerative Agriculture technology called Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD), where water was applied only when needed, reducing waste, preventing crop loss, and lowering methane emissions.
11.) What particular examples would you cite from Nigeria to show the effectiveness of regenerative agriculture?
In the last over three decades, SAA has reached more than 20 million farmers with innovations that are transforming livelihoods and lifting people out of poverty. For instance, there is widespread use of mulching, biochar, USG and cover cropping, as a result of our work. Farmers who have adopted these practices have reported improved soil moisture retention, reduced fertiliser requirements, and more stable yields. In communities we have worked, farmers growing crops such as rice, maize etc have more than doubled their yields.

Besides, as a result of SAA interventions, there are notable examples of growing adoption of agroforestry systems in states such as Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, and parts of the Middle Belt. Even in Oyo State. Farmers are integrating tree species such as Faidherbia albida, Gliricidia sepium and various fruit trees with crops. These have helped improve soil fertility, reduce erosion, enhance biodiversity, and increase resilience to drought.