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NIRSAL MD named among best global CEOs

By Tosin Adams
28 June 2021   |   4:05 am
In recognition of his outstanding contributions to agriculture and agribusiness, the Managing Director/CEO of the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL Plc)

Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, NISRAL Plc, Aliyu Abdulhameed

In recognition of his outstanding contributions to agriculture and agribusiness, the Managing Director/CEO of the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL Plc), Aliyu Abdulhameed, has emerged winner of the CEO Today magazine Global Award 2021.

The publication identifies and honours the most respected companies and their C-level executives who lead the way for others on a global stage.

According to the medium, the 2021 award is special because it recognised CEOs who, despite the odds brought on by the coronavirus, successfully executed their corporate strategies.

In its flagship publication, CEO Today highlighted NIRSAL Plc’s innovations, achievements and plans under Abdulhameed’s leadership as exemplary and worthy of recognition.

To the magazine, some of the innovations that have been introduced to the Nigerian agriculture sector as a result of Abdulhameed’s stewardship at NIRSAL include the creation of the NIRSAL Agro Geo-Cooperative (AGC) concept, which structures farmers and aggregates their farmlands into contiguous stretches of 250 hectares each and links them with training, input, mechanisation, financing and produce buyers.

Others are the creation and mapping of Agricultural Commodity Ecological Areas (ACEAs); the development of the Mapping to Markets (M2M) strategy; the development of innovative index-based agricultural insurance products; the introduction of comprehensive field monitoring by remote sensing satellite systems and granular validation by UAS platforms; and the development of the Secured Agricultural Commodity Transport & Storage Corridor (SATS-C) model, to address logistical inefficiencies in the agricultural value chain in Nigeria.

Among NIRSAL Plc’s achievements that enhanced CEO Today’s reckoning of the institution and its CEO, Abdulhameed, is the facilitation of over US$550 million to various actors across Agricultural Value Chains for mechanisation activities, input distribution, and the production, processing, trading and marketing of agricultural commodities.

Owing to NIRSAL Plc’s solutions, commercial banks have pledged to provide an additional US$500 million to fund agriculture in the short to medium-term, provided the NIRSAL Credit Risk Guarantee (CRG) and its structured Agro Geo-Cooperatives® remain in place. It is an indication that financiers are growing more and more confident in lending to agriculture. This claim is made true by the remarkable growth in the rate of bank lending to agriculture, from 1.4 per cent pre-NIRSAL to 4.8 per cent as of Q3 2020.

Abdulhameed has acknowledged that the award, which came as a surprise, would serve as a motivation in his quest to bring about even more positive change in agriculture in Nigeria through his position as MD/CEO of NIRSAL Plc. He said that NIRSAL’s strict adherence to global best practices had proven to be effective given CEO Today’s recognition and award.

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