Nigeria’s Vice-President Kashim Shettima and Ethiopia’s Deputy Prime Minister Temesgen Tiruneh have pledged to deepen cooperation on trade, agriculture, nutrition and security, meeting on the sidelines of the Nigeria-Ethiopia Nutrition Leadership Exchange Forum in Addis Ababa. The forum brought the two governments together specifically to compare approaches to tackling child malnutrition.
Shettima called for stronger intra-African investment under the African Continental Free Trade Area, pointing to the Dangote Group’s existing investments in Ethiopia as a model for deeper private-sector ties between the two economies. Tiruneh welcomed that framing and described Ethiopia’s own nutrition strategy, centred on the Seqota Declaration, a 15-year programme launched in 2015 that began in the communities hit hardest by malnutrition before expanding to cover roughly half the country.
On agriculture, Shettima commended Ethiopia’s progress on domestic value addition, a priority that mirrors Nigeria’s own push to process more of its farm output locally rather than exporting raw commodities. Tiruneh, in turn, raised the Transfer of Sentenced Persons Agreement between the two countries and called for the Nigeria-Ethiopia Joint Commission to convene, a mechanism intended to formalise cooperation across trade, security and other shared priorities. Shettima affirmed Nigeria’s commitment to that framework.
Learning from a 15-year nutrition programme
The Seqota Declaration is one of the longer-running government-led nutrition strategies in Africa, and its phased expansion, starting in the worst-affected districts before scaling nationally, offers Nigeria a potential template as it works through its own 2026-2035 food and nutrition policy. Nigeria’s nutrition council adopted that policy late last month, targeting chronic child malnutrition, though it is still pending final cabinet ratification.
Aligning two national nutrition strategies is harder than the diplomatic language of a bilateral meeting suggests. Ethiopia’s Seqota model depends on strong decentralised implementation through regional and district health structures, built up over more than a decade, while Nigeria’s federal system and larger population present a different set of delivery challenges. Any lessons Nigeria draws from Ethiopia’s experience will need to be adapted substantially rather than copied directly.
The meeting produced no financial commitments or firm timelines beyond the stated intentions to convene the Joint Commission and expand private investment. That leaves the practical substance of the cooperation still to be worked out, likely through follow-up technical talks between the two governments’ agriculture, trade and health ministries.
Aviation was also listed among the areas for cooperation, though neither side detailed what that might involve, and Tiruneh used the meeting to pass on condolences over a recent air crash in Nigeria’s Ondo state.
For both countries, the forum’s nutrition focus points to a shared recognition that food security gains mean little without parallel progress on child health outcomes. Ghana’s school feeding programme, which has scaled sharply in recent years, offers a different model again, suggesting African governments are experimenting with several parallel approaches to the same underlying problem rather than converging on one. Whether Nigeria and Ethiopia’s pledges translate into joint programming, rather than remaining a diplomatic exchange of experience, will depend on the technical talks that follow.
Both countries carry a heavy burden of child malnutrition relative to their populations, and both have struggled at times to turn national strategies into consistent district-level delivery. A forum built specifically around comparing nutrition leadership, rather than trade or security alone, suggests officials on both sides see more practical value in exchanging implementation lessons than in symbolic gestures. The test will come in whether either government revises its own programme design in response to what it heard in Addis Ababa.
