Changing the Data Landscape: The VIFAA Nigeria Dashboard
In place of unwieldy spreadsheets and dozens of sources, the VIFAA Dashboard introduces a “one-stop-shop” for trustworthy, visually appealing information that is key to understanding Nigeria’s fertilizer sector.
Over the last two years, Development Gateway (DG) has collaborated with Africafertilizer.org (AFO), the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC), the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Quantitative Engineering Design (QED), the private sector, research institutions, and development partners to map Nigeria’s demand, supply, and use of fertilizer data. These findings have come together through the Visualizing Insights on Fertilizer for African Agriculture (VIFAA) program, which is generously supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and implemented in Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana.
The Nigeria Dashboard
Together, partners co-designed a publicly available dashboard that aims to address key decision-making needs. The Dashboard contains 14 core indicators, such as fertilizer retail price, cropland under production, and monthly product imports, to highlight and visualize key aspects of Nigeria’s fertilizer supply chain. Partners worked extensively through group and individual sessions to gather feedback on data priorities, receiving input from stakeholders across institutions. Data for the dashboard comes from a broad range of private and public fertilizer stakeholders, with Africafertilizer.org gathering, validating, and updating the data on a regular basis. A full list of data sources and methodology for each indicator is available on the dashboard site.
Cropland Under Production
In a first for the VIFAA Program, partners worked to generate comprehensive cropland under production maps, some of the first in Nigeria’s recent history. Collaborating with machine learning and satellite imagery experts, QED, resulted in the generation of an updated map that provides information on the total land under production (across all crops) in Nigeria; what percentage is under production versus uncultivated; and how production breaks down by state and geopolitical zone. The partners hope that the dashboard and use of innovative tools to fill data gaps are the beginning of boosting data quality and use across Nigeria’s fertilizer sector.
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