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Managing Director of Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL), Aliyu Abdulhameed, has been nominated as winner of the CEO Today Magazine Global Award 2021.

CEO Today Magazine honours the most-respected companies and their C-Level executives who lead the way for others on a global stage. According to the magazine, the 2021 awards are special because the CEOs selected, delivered despite the Coronavirus pandemic.

The magazine highlights NIRSAL Plc’s innovations, achievements and plans under Abdulhameed’s leadership as exemplary and worthy of recognition.

Some of the innovations introduced to the Nigerian Agriculture sector under Abdulhameed’s leadership at NIRSAL Plc include: the creation of NIRSAL Agro Geo-Cooperative® (AGC) concept which structures farmers, aggregates their farmlands into contiguous stretches of 250 hectares each and links them with training, inputs, mechanization, financing and produce buyers.

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They include the creation & mapping of Agricultural Commodity Ecological Areas (ACEAs); the development of the Mapping to Markets (M2M) strategy; the development of innovative index-based agricultural insurance products; the introduction of comprehensive field monitoring by remote sensing satellite systems and granular validation by UAS platforms; and the development of the Secured Agricultural Commodity Transport & Storage Corridor (SATS-C) model to address logistical inefficiencies in the agricultural value chain in Nigeria.

Among NIRSAL’s achievements under Abdulhameed’s watch is the facilitation of over $550 million to various actors across Agricultural Value Chains for mechanisation activities, input distribution, and the production, processing, trading and marketing of agricultural commodities.

Owing to NIRSAL Plc’s solutions, commercial banks have pledged to provide an additional $500 million to fund agriculture in the short to medium-term, provided the NIRSAL Credit Risk Guarantee (CRG) and its structured Agro Geo-Cooperatives® remain in place. It is an indication that financiers are growing more and more confident in lending to agriculture. This claim is made true by the remarkable growth in the rate of bank lending to agriculture, from 1.4% pre-NIRSAL to 4.8 per cent as of Q3 2020.

Mr. Abdulhameed described the award, as a surprise, would serve as a motivation in his quest to bring about even more positive change in Agriculture in the country.

CEO Today collates votes and carries out in-depth sector by sector research to choose the very best among the world’s CEOs to reward and celebrate their leadership style and visionary impetus. Winners of this year’s global awards come from the academia, tech, e-commerce, public administration and more from several countries including the UAE, Germany, USA, Sweden, Bulgaria and China.