The Challenge
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with around 223 million people, relies heavily on agriculture to guarantee food security and support economic development. The sector accounts for 23% of GDP and 35% of total employment. Yet, processing a mandatory phytosanitary certificate to show a shipment of agricultural products is free of pests and disease typically involved a lot of duplicative paperwork and cumbersome manual processes.
What We Did
The Alliance catalysed public-private partnership – collaborating with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, global and local businesses and their representative organisations – to support the National Agricultural Quarantine Services (NAQS) in digitalising phytosanitary certification exchange by implementing the IPPC ePhyto Solution.
The Impacts
Adopting electronic phytosanitary certification allows agricultural exporters to benefit from time and cost savings. Digitalisation eliminates the requirement to spend hours travelling in person to regional offices of the NAQS, and long waits to complete phytosanitary formalities. The ePhyto Solution also provides NAQS officials access to structured pre-arrival data, allowing them to concentrate their efforts on higher-risk import consignments. And, in the case of exports, electronic authentication replaces a system that relied upon the availability of officials to answer email or phone requests.
Nigeria
