Designing a Blockchain-Based Supply Chain Transparency Platform for Nigerian Agriculture Exporters

Nigerian agricultural export value chains, including cashew nuts from Kogi, sesame from Borno, and cocoa from Ondo, suffer from opacity and counterparty trust deficits that limit access to premium export markets and fair pricing. This study designed a blockchain-based supply chain transparency platform for Nigerian agricultural exporters. A permissioned Hyperledger Fabric blockchain was selected over public blockchain platforms to avoid transaction fees and manage privacy between supply chain participants. Smart contracts were written in Go to record product provenance events including farm-gate purchase, aggregator collection, quality certification, export processing, and shipping. A REST API layer exposed blockchain read and write endpoints to a farmer-facing Android mobile app and a web portal for exporters and international buyers. QR codes linked physical product batches to their on-chain provenance records, which buyers could verify independently. The platform was prototyped and tested with a simulated supply chain scenario for 200 kg of cashew nuts from Kogi State sourced from five smallholder farmers to a fictitious European buyer. Transaction throughput on the Hyperledger Fabric network achieved 350 transactions per second. End-to-end provenance verification query time was below 2 seconds. Farmer data privacy from competing supply chain actors was enforced through channel architecture. The study recommends the NEXIM Bank and Nigerian Export Promotion Council pilot the platform with one cashew and one sesame export corridor and engage the African Development Bank's digital agriculture initiative for funding.

Keywords: blockchain, supply chain transparency, agricultural export, Hyperledger Fabric, Nigeria