An international organisation, the Development Gateway, has unveiled what it called ‘Fertiliser Dashboard’ under the Visualising Insights on Fertiliser for African Agriculture (VIFAA), to monitor the country’s price, consumption, availability and export volume.
Its Nigeria Project Manager, Beverley Hatcher-Mbu, who spoke to newsmen yesterday in Abuja, clarified that the initiative is being sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“The dashboard gathers key data on Nigeria’s, fertiliser sector on price, and consumption and product availability and makes it easy to use to access, and free to the public. So, anybody in the private sector and public sector can use it.
“We worked closely with the International Fertiliser Development Center (IFDC) that has an office here in Nigeria.
“So, they both collect their own data, including retail price and they also work closely in what we call the fertilizer technical working group to ensure that all key actors agree on the key data points that show up on the dashboard.
“One key outcome is that if everybody starts from the same point with their data, they can make the same kinds of decisions. “So, it is not that public sector and private sector use different data and are trying to figure out what the best part is forward.