Nigeria is lining up another major multilateral financing deal, with the World Bank expected to take a decision next month on a $500m agricultural support project designed to lift farm output, expand value chains and generate jobs across several states.
Project documents seen by News Bracket show that the loan proposal—formally titled the Nigeria Sustainable Agricultural Value-Chains for Growth—has reached the final internal stages at the **World Bank**. An approval date of March 30, 2026, is pencilled into the bank’s Project Information Document.
The paperwork puts both the “Total Operation Cost” and “Total Financing” at $500m, with the full amount to be provided as concessional funding from the **International Development Association**. The borrower is listed as the Federal Republic of Nigeria, while implementation will rest with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security alongside participating states.
At its core, the project is aimed at boosting productivity at the grassroots. The stated objective is “to increase smallholder productivity and strengthen targeted agricultural value chains in participating states of Nigeria.”
According to the decision section of the document, internal reviews have already moved beyond appraisal. The bank noted that “The review did authorise the team to appraise and negotiate,” an indication that the proposal has cleared a critical hurdle ahead of board consideration.
The background analysis in the document paints a familiar picture of Nigeria’s development pressures. The bank said that “Creating more and better jobs while addressing food and nutrition insecurity remain some of Nigeria’s key development challenges.” Agriculture, it added, remains central to livelihoods, with “roughly one-third of Nigeria’s working population relying on the sector for their livelihood,” while primary agriculture employs “about 21 million people.”
Despite this scale, food imports remain heavy. The World Bank observed that Nigeria currently imports “approximately $10bn worth of food annually,” underscoring the gap the new programme hopes to narrow.
The initiative—also branded AGROW—will follow what the bank calls “a private sector-led, public sector-facilitated approach to enhance smallholder farmer productivity, systematically integrate them into structured output markets, and promote value addition.” It is also designed to align with the Federal Government’s Renewed Hope Agenda, positioning agriculture as a lever for rural jobs and income growth.
Structurally, the $500m credit will be split across four pillars: linking smallholders to competitive value chains; modernising farm production; strengthening policies and the broader environment for private investment in inputs; and overall project coordination and monitoring.
Under the value-chain pillar, the focus will be on aggregation models that tie farmers more closely to off-takers and agribusinesses, cutting transaction costs and improving reliability of supply. Production support will target research, extension services, improved seed systems and digital agriculture tools to raise yields and resilience. A separate policy stream will tackle bottlenecks in seed and fertiliser markets and promote responsible land-based investments under the Framework for Responsible and Inclusive Land-Intensive Agriculture.
If the board signs off at the end of March, the new IDA credit will deepen Nigeria’s already significant exposure to the World Bank. Nigeria’s debt to the IDA climbed by $1.9bn in a single year to $18.7bn as of December 31, 2025. IDA’s own Management Discussion and Analysis showed total exposure rising from $16.8bn at end-2024, an 11.3 per cent increase year on year.
Those figures place Nigeria as the third-largest IDA borrower globally, behind Bangladesh and Pakistan, highlighting a growing dependence on concessional multilateral financing as fiscal space tightens.
Official data from the Debt Management Office show that as of June 30, 2025, Nigeria’s external debt stood at $46.98bn. Of this, the World Bank Group accounted for $19.39bn—$18.04bn from IDA and $1.35bn from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—meaning the institution holds 41.3 per cent of Nigeria’s total external debt and remains a dominant funder of its development agenda.
