NASRDA Opens Three-Day Workshop on Satellite-Based Irrigation Mapping in Nigeria

The National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) has commenced a three-day stakeholder workshop titled “Advancing Satellite-Based Tools to Map Irrigated Cropland in Nigeria,” bringing together government agencies, research institutions, development partners, and traditional rulers to address one of the country’s most persistent agricultural challenges: the near-total dependence of Nigerian farmers on rainfall.

The workshop, which opened on March 3, 2026, is structured around two complementary projects: the Irrigated Earth Observation (IrrEO) programme and the Earth Observation for Crop Type Mapping in Nigeria initiative, and is designed to consolidate dialogue, align data priorities, and lay the groundwork for a nationally integrated irrigation monitoring system.

Two Projects, One Shared Goal

The IrrEO project is a four-year research and development programme funded by a GBP 3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, running from September 2025 to August 2029. It aims to develop an open-source, continuously updated agricultural data repository to support policy planning, decision-making, and agricultural extension services at the national scale. Nigeria is one of three focus countries alongside Kenya and Ethiopia. The project is being implemented in Nigeria by the University of Manchester’s Manchester Environmental Research Institute (MERI), NASRDA, and Airbus.

Running alongside it is the Earth Observation for Crop Type Mapping in Nigeria project, led by the University of Delaware, a partner that has maintained a research relationship with NASRDA since 2010. The project uses machine-learning-assisted, fine-scale prediction models to map cropland and crop types across Nigeria, with the aim of building a clearer, more precise understanding of the country’s food system. Additional implementing partners include Clark University, the University of Minnesota, WorldFish, the University of Ibadan, and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA).

The two projects are brought together through national and international stakeholder workshops, of which this is one, designed to strengthen collaboration among government institutions, research organisations, and development partners, eliminate duplication of effort, and ensure that technical outputs translate into visible, measurable results at the grassroots level.

The Problem the Workshop Is Built Around

The opening framing of the workshop was unambiguous: ~90% of cultivation in Nigeria relies entirely on rainfall. The country’s irrigated farmland remains at a fraction of its potential, leaving the majority of Nigerian farmers confined to the wet season and exposed to the irregularities of precipitation, a vulnerability that has deepened with shifting climate patterns.

Dr Godstime James, Director of the Department of Space Science Applications (DSSA) at NASRDA, set out the structural constraints that have held back irrigation development. These include deteriorating water infrastructure, with many canals and irrigation stations poorly maintained or abandoned, the high cost of irrigation systems, which places them out of reach for smallholder farmers, unreliable electricity supply that undermines electric-powered irrigation, fragmented land tenure that limits landscape-level irrigation development, and insufficient technical capacity to support extension services and irrigation management.

“Through the IrrEO project, high-resolution satellite imagery, with advanced machine learning techniques and field validation, will be integrated to produce reliable irrigated crop maps,” he said. These outputs, he noted, would support River Basin Development Authorities, ministries, departments, and agencies at both the federal and state levels in making informed decisions on irrigation expansion, monitoring, and resource allocation.

The DG’s Address

The workshop was formally declared open by Dr Matthew Adepoju, Director General of NASRDA, who used his address to situate the event within NASRDA’s broader mandate to deploy space science and technology in the service of Nigeria’s development priorities. Dr Adepoju described the workshop as a demonstration of what the purposeful application of satellite technology looks like, not as an end in itself, but as a means of solving problems that directly affect millions of Nigerian farmers.

He noted that irrigation mapping represents precisely the kind of use case NASRDA exists to advance: one where Earth Observation data moves from research outputs into practical tools that government, farmers, and investors can act on. He called on all participants to engage the sessions with the seriousness the moment demands, stressing that the data gaps the projects seek to close have real consequences for food production, economic planning, and national resilience. With that, he declared the workshop officially open.

Opening the Workshop

Dr Seun Adeluyi, the IrrEO Nigeria Lead, opened proceedings by situating the workshop within a broader, long-term ambition. In his words: “The three-day workshop has been carefully structured to combine high-level engagement, technical knowledge exchange, and practical collaboration. Our objective is not only to present findings, but to collectively shape how satellite-based Earth Observation tools can strengthen irrigation planning, management, and policy in Nigeria.”

He described what success would look like at the close of the three days: “By the end of this workshop, we expect to have a clearer understanding of user needs, priority data products, platform requirements, and a shared roadmap for integrating satellite-based irrigation monitoring into Nigeria’s agricultural planning systems.”

Voices from the Floor

The workshop drew goodwill messages from a range of stakeholders, each offering a distinct perspective on why the work matters.

1. Oba Dokum Thomson, His Royal Majesty the Oloni of Eti-Oni in Osun State, and custodian of the oldest cocoa plantation in Nigeria, spoke to the potential of the projects to support year-round farming across both food and cash crops. He noted that improved data acquisition and its practical application at the community level could build the kind of resilience that helps farmers absorb market volatility.
2. Colonel Olumese Gibson Efeovbokhan, representing the Army War College of Nigeria, drew a connection between expanded, mapped irrigation and national security. Agricultural productivity and food security, he argued, have a direct bearing on stability: communities with reliable food production are less susceptible to the conditions that drive insecurity.
3. Dr Tunrayo Alabi, GIS Support Services Manager at IITA, expressed appreciation for the strengthening relationship between IITA and NASRDA, and underscored the value of building a comprehensive map of Nigeria’s irrigated systems as a foundation for agricultural resilience.
4. Dr Temidayo Onisoun of Space in Africa welcomed NASRDA’s role in championing a credible, high-impact use case for space-derived data, translating satellite technology into actionable intelligence on food security, and making that data available in an affordable, accessible format for decision-makers.

The Research Case

In his keynote address, Dr Kyle Davis (University of Delaware) outlined the gap between the information currently available on Nigerian agriculture and what decision-makers actually need. The core challenge is precision: policymakers need to know accurately where, when, and how much food is produced, not as a statistical exercise, but to assess national capacity, plan against food shortfalls, and target interventions effectively. That level of granularity does not yet exist in a reliable, open-access form.

Dr Davis described the project’s vision as co-developing open-source, low-cost data infrastructure to support comprehensive, spatially explicit, and up-to-date agricultural statistics for Nigeria, products that can inform decisions at multiple scales, from local farming communities to international food security assessments. The work is organised around four goals: mapping all croplands and field boundaries; mapping all staple crops and their yields; mapping other food system elements; and building an open-source agricultural dataverse.

Dr Timothy Foster (University of Manchester) provided the IrrEO-specific context. The numbers are stark: approximately <10% of farmland in Africa is currently irrigated. Traditional ground surveys, he noted, are not a viable monitoring tool at the national scale, given large areas, limited resources, and in some areas, insecurity. Satellite Earth Observation offers a scalable alternative, one that can track irrigation dynamics continuously, cost-effectively, and across the whole country.

He walked through the project’s two-phase structure. The first phase centres on ground-truth surveys, with ~4,000 surveys across Nigeria; the first round runs from March to June 2026, with a second planned for early 2027. These surveys will collect data on cropping practices, irrigation access and use, and field locations to train and validate mapping algorithms. Alongside the surveys, stakeholder workshops will identify data gaps and decision-making needs for government, agribusiness, and research users.

The second phase shifts to application: training workshops for government, private sector, and research users to build local Earth Observation skills and the capacity to update models over time; and data use cases that operationally test the tools developed by the project. Two areas of focus in this phase are retrospective impact evaluations, using maps to identify where irrigation has scaled successfully and where it has not, and examining why, and socio-economic assessments that evaluate the value of mapping data for investment decisions, water accounting, food security forecasting, and market targeting.

What the Workshop Is Designed to Produce

The aims of the workshop were laid out clearly for participants. The three days are structured to map Nigeria’s irrigation data landscape by building a shared picture of how irrigation decisions are made across government, agribusiness, farming communities, and research, and where information gaps are constraining irrigation at scale. From there, participants will identify where Earth Observation can realistically address those gaps and define what useful irrigation data looks like in practice for different use cases and user types.

The outputs are not advisory. Each session feeds directly into the IrrEO team’s research agenda, platform design, and policy recommendations. Participants were explicitly told: your priorities will determine which datasets and models the project develops.

To anchor Day 1 discussions in real-world experience, three questions were posed to the full plenary: What are the biggest challenges limiting irrigation development and adoption in Nigeria? If Nigeria is to significantly expand and intensify irrigation in the next five to ten years, what must be done differently from past approaches? And how could digital technologies such as Earth Observation support changes in how irrigation is planned, managed, or monitored?

What Comes Next

Days 2 and 3 of the workshop will move from presentation into structured working groups. Participants will map baseline data availability, identify unmet needs and gaps across stakeholder groups, and develop practical methods to address them. The sessions will culminate in the design of platform specifications and implementation roadmaps — outputs intended to ensure that the data infrastructure built by IrrEO and its partner projects remains sustainable, relevant, and used beyond the life of the research programme.