Internet access in Nigeria is set to triple in the next two years, Reuters reports. According to Funke Opeke, C.E.O. of the Main One Cable Company, a leading West African submarine cable company which has laid a 7,000 km fibre optic cable linking West Africa to Europe “at least one in three people in Nigeria could have direct Internet access by 2013. We would say a number in the 35-40 percent for Internet access penetration over the next 18-24 months would be a worthwhile objective.” In a nation of about 150 million people, this portends strong prospects for web based businesses.

The market potential in Nigeria is huge. Already, the mobile phone subscription market in the country is the continent’s largest with South Africa’s MTN Group, India’s Bharti Airtel, Abu Dhabi based Etisalat and Nigeria’s Globacom serving as key industry players. As of May this year, the country’s telecommunications regulator estimated that there were 80 million plus mobile phone subscribers. At the same time, mobile Internet is quickly becoming the platform of choice for young Internet users in the country. A survey conducted by Opera in its State of the Mobile Web report last year revealed that 90% of Nigerian Internet users between the ages of 18-27 said they use their mobile phones more than desktop or laptop computers to access the Internet.

“We have a large young population, if you think of all the students in tertiary education and if you think of businesses which are not yet fully automated. If access now becomes more available and prices are within reach then all of those groups stand to benefit and would enable the attainment of 35 to 40 percent number, which we believe will have significant impact on the economy,” Opeke said.

Web based services especially those with a strong mobile component appear poised to experience a boon in the next two years given these projections. It would be interesting to monitor Nigeria’s web start up scene as more entrepreneurs respond to the favourable growth rates in the country’s Internet market.

For more on Nigeria’s Internet market, read this interview with Nigerian Internet entrepreneur/former NBA player, Obinna Ekezie

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The Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has declared that Nigerian ports are now safer following the concessioning of services at the ports.

Speaking at a press briefing in Lagos, on Thursday, the Area Controller of the Tin Can Island Port Command, Lagos, Austen Warikoru, said that before now, there was a lot of pilferage going on at the ports by ‘wharf rats’ but “today, this no longer happens.”

“Vehicles are no longer vandalised and things are much better in terms of security of goods,”  he said, adding, however, that the main problem since concessioning took effect has been infrastructure. “We need better infrastructure, for example, offices, which are currently on a makeshift arrangement.”

The controller added that his command also needed more equipment, such as forklifts, asserting that there was incessant breakdown of equipment at the command.

While agreeing that the concessionaires generally rendered better service compared to what was obtainable in the past, he lamented that their charges were usually too high. He believed, however, that with growing competition, the charges would soon go down.

While fielding questions from the pressmen, Warikoru stated that being a service in a “third world” country, the major objective of the Nigeria Customs Service was revenue generation and collection, while not losing sight of security, especially as relating to the enforcement of the list

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In its initial condition, Africa’s agriculture bears a striking resemblance to its telecom sector in the late 1990s. A decade on, a combination of right policies and strengthened regulatory framework has seen the sector open up to free enterprise, attracting about $60 billion in private investments and leading to today’s ICT boom: 450 million mobile phones in Africa, which is more mobile phones than Canada, Mexico and the United States combined.

As with telecom, the “early movers” into Africa’s agriculture are likely to reap the most rewards. And we are seeing significant interests from Middle Eastern, North African, South African and Asian firms seeking to establish commercial farms and agri-businesses along the value chain.

With only one-fourth of Africa’s arable land (50 per cent of global arable land) currently in use accounting for a mere 10 per cent of global food production, an agriculture and agri-business sector in full bloom is likely to result in even more transformational change in the lives of the world’s bottom billion than ICTs.

This is not some distant, future dream. Even die-hard afro-pessimists now concede that the global tide is turning in Africa’s favour, revealing a virgin market of one billion people, and a potential trillion dollar economy with enormous staying power and no less than 29 per cent of the world’s youth by 2025.

But timing matters, and huge windows of financial and economic opportunity are open to the pacesetters. Agriculture, I must reiterate, is not only Africa’s “next big thing.” It is already its life wire: it is Africa’s leading private sector. Some 70 per cent of Africans depend on it for their livelihoods, and it accounts for about 40 per cent of the region’s GDP.

During my dialogue last week with hundreds of young civil society leaders from 18 African countries, I was not surprised by their optimism about agriculture. Their eagerness to be involved in the sector was as infectious as it was enlightening for me and my colleagues. However, they were very clear as to what must be done by their governments and partners, to make agriculture work for jobs. I would summarize their views in four major areas.

First, governments (traditional, local and national) need to guarantee land rights for farmers, ensuring that large commercial farms – which are bound to employ fewer people — co-exist with the millions of smallholder farms – which preserve and maximize the job opportunities the sector offers, as well as provide the nucleus for establishing small and medium-size agri-businesses along the value chain. Attention must also be paid to ensure that male farmers – often the first to hop on a tractor and the ones most likely in rural areas to manage the money flowing from agriculture — do not marginalise women farmers, who hold the key to food security.

Valorising land and ensuring that Africa’s banking and financial sectors recognise it as one of the most tangible economic assets of Africa is just as important as building and maintaining adequate infrastructure like farm-to-market roads.

Second, young Africans do not want to be the farmers their grandparents were: hoe in hand, tilling the soil in scorching sun all year round, harvesting barely enough to feed, shelter and house their families. Making the sector more attractive to the African youth – seven-to-ten million of whom join the labour force each year – must entail modernising agriculture, raising productivity, boosting incomes, and expanding links to export markets.

Smallholder farmers would need access not only to more productive seeds and other farm inputs, but also to irrigation, research, technology and finance. Seed funding, notably in the form of grants, patient capital or loans from commercial banks guaranteed by some facility or the valorised farmland could make the difference between a farm start-up failing or prospering. Obstructionist policies, such as price controls, food export bans, and restrictions to cross-and within-border trade, need to be eliminated.

As one participant from Sierra Leone put it: “The market is the problem,” he said, complaining about the ban on his country’s food exports to such neighbouring countries as Gambia, Liberia and Senegal.

A third priority must be that of linking farmers to markets, including the sale opportunities that school feeding or food voucher programmes can generate by buying from local farmers. Pilot initiatives like the World Food Programme’s “Purchasing for Progress,” which has sourced about $1 billion worth of humanitarian food directly from African farmers over the last three years, would need to be expanded. Electronic vouchers, provided through “scratch cards” similar to prepaid phone cards and mobile phone-enabled platforms, have offered funding for food purchases for the poor in Liberia.

Connecting African farmers to Internet-based platforms such as the Ethiopian Commodities Exchange, which made deals worth $1 billion in its first three years of existence would be as essential as linking these farmers to giant global retailers like the U.S.-based Walmart, whose foundation plans to plow about $1 billion in Africa in order to have direct influence over its supply chain. So, too, would be an integrated approach to infrastructure development that combines highway or railroad construction with the setting up of vast agricultural plantations under the so-called “development corridor” model.

Devising these and other smarter ways of reaching markets and consumers would help trim the estimated 35 per cent of food supplies lost on the continent during the post-harvest, transport to market, storage, processing and conservation phases.

Fourth, reforms across Africa will work only if global food markets work for Africa and unfair trade practices are ended. The issue of subsidies by developed countries — currently estimated at $360 billion – will need to be resolved. Young African farmers entering the sector will prosper not only if they can trade, but if trade is fair and if mechanisms to promote transparency on existing stocks help prevent speculators from using food as a commodity to make money on the backs of farmers.

Success would require an integrated approach such as that offered within the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) framework – with the strategic pillars of land and water management, markets and infrastructure, food security and vulnerability and agricultural technology. It would also require significant investments. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says the $22 billion pledged by the G20 at the Pittsburgh Summit barely gets things started. However, while foreign investors and donors can help, African countries which committed in Maputo in 2002 to devote at least 10 per cent of their national budgets to agriculture are those who must step up to the plate.

Mali, which currently devotes 13 per cent of its national budget to the sector, is one of very few countries that have either met or surpassed this target. Too many other countries invest far too little. Cameroon, for example, devotes an estimated one per cent of the national budget to the agriculture sector, although the sector employs 70 per cent of the population and accounts for 40 per cent of the country’s GDP. Without significantly higher investments, the sector will not deliver on the millions of jobs it promises. Much worse: the 2002 World Food Summit warned that business as usual in agriculture could mean that the aim of halving world hunger by 2015 will only be met in 2150.

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