The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Tropical General Investments (TGI) Group have officially launched a three-year partnership designed to support more than 5,000 smallholders and create over 10,000 jobs. 

Executed through TGI’s specialised agribusiness subsidiary, WACOT Limited, the targeted intervention will operate across agricultural communities in Benue and Cross River States, offering sustainable financial lifelines to refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and vulnerable host families.

The alliance scales up at a critical period for global and domestic displacement management. 

According to the UNHCR’s newly released Global Trends data, an unprecedented 117.8 million people remain forcefully displaced worldwide, with humanitarian responsibility hosting more than 3.8 million displaced persons, while Nigerian nationals themselves account for 3.5 per cent of the world’s total uprooted population. 

The joint framework bypasses traditional, short-term emergency charity handouts, focusing instead on market-driven commercial integration.

Participating cultivators will receive premium agricultural inputs on credit, intensive technical field training, formal international certifications, and direct, guaranteed off-taker market access. The outgrower crop matrix explicitly covers five of Nigeria’s high-demand commodity value chains: rice, maize, sesame, soybeans, and cocoa. 

Speaking on the strategic goals of the rollout, the UNHCR Representative in Nigeria, Mr Arjun Jain, emphasised that the initiative is built to connect marginalised populations with functional corporate ecosystems, allowing families to systematically rebuild their livelihoods with dignity while contributing directly to the national gross domestic product (GDP).

Operational field deployments have already actively commenced, with state government inter-agency consultations, local community mappings, and comprehensive soil chemistry samplings fully concluded across the target regions. 

Highlighting the private sector’s commercial interest in the framework, Mrs Habiba Sulaiman of the TGI Group stated that integrating displaced smallholders into the permanent corporate pipeline effectively builds institutional resilience. 

By utilising WACOT’s 25 years of domestic processing experience, the joint program is projected to deliver measurable economic benefits to between 25,000 and 35,000 rural dependents over its initial three-year implementation cycle.

Source: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees