In this interview, a former Special Advisor to the President of the African Development Bank, Prof. Banji Oyelaran-Oyeyinka, speaks with GRACE EDEMA on the newly unveiled TransComs initiative, a model designed to drive rural industrialisation by transforming semi-urban and rural communities into integrated economic hubs across Southwest Nigeria
What opportunities will TransComs open up for young people and SMEs in the region?
This is, for me, the heart of the programme. Every infrastructure decision we make is ultimately in service of this question. For young people, TransComs creates three distinct opportunity pathways. The first is skills and employment within the hubs themselves through processing operations, quality control, logistics coordination, digital services, hub management. These are not low-wage, informal jobs; they are structured roles within a formalised economic unit. The second pathway is enterprise: the cooperative and SME development infrastructure within each hub is designed to help young entrepreneurs formalise, scale, and access markets they currently cannot reach. The third is the digital economy layer through opportunities in agritech, e-commerce, data services, and platform businesses that the hub’s connectivity infrastructure makes possible. For SMEs, the primary value is aggregated sourcing, market access and standards compliance. A significant portion of Southwest Nigeria’s small agro-processors, artisanal producers gather insufficient stock feed, and service enterprises are locked out of formal and export markets not because their products lack quality, but because they lack the certification, packaging standards, and logistics infrastructure to meet buyer requirements. TransComs resolves that bottleneck collectively as the hub invests in shared infrastructure that would be prohibitive for any single SME to replicate. There is also a financial dimension. The programme’s cooperative structures and our engagement with fintech and microfinance partners are designed to expand access to working capital and business development services for enterprises that are currently underserved by formal financial institutions. The ambition is not just a hub, but a self-reinforcing local economy.
Can you explain what TransComs is about?
TransComs — short for Transformed Communities — is a structured, place-based economic development programmedesigned to bridge the gap between Nigeria’s urban centres and its semi-urban and rural communities. At its core, the programme creates what we call Standards-Ready TransComs: integrated community hubs that bring together agro-industrial processing, digital infrastructure, youth enterprise development, and health and social services under a single, governable framework. The concept emerges from a simple but urgent observation: Nigeria has enormous productive capacity in agriculture, in culture, in its young population, but that capacity hemorrhagesvalue because communities lack the infrastructure, standards, and institutional connectivity to participate in formal markets. A cassava farmer in Ogbomoso or a weaver in a rural Oyo community should be able to meet export standards, access cold chain logistics, and sell into national, continental and global markets. TransComs creates the architecture for that to happen. Each TransCom hub combines physical infrastructure such as processing facilities, digital connectivity, warehousing, with soft infrastructure: skills development, cooperative structures, quality certification, and linkage to financial services. The Ogbomoso pilot, anchored on a five-hectare site secured through the Oba of Fapote, is our proof-of-concept for this model across Southwest, Nigeria.
Is there a framework or theory that supports TransCOM?
I always test an idea on three ‘Ps.’ These are: what principle (theory) is behind the idea, what is the Policy framework and is how does it work in Practice? Our conception of TransCOM is inspired by the framework of ‘clustering’ that I have written extensively on. For example, an Industrial cluster represents a geographic concentration of related businesses, suppliers, and institutions. TransCOM is an agglomeration of several actors in proximity with each other: farmers, SMEs, homes and so forth. This concentration has four key advantages. First, it enhances productivity, stimulates social innovation, and foster entrepreneurship among their members. Clusters facilitate the exchange of specialised information, skills, and resources. TransCOM, a larger rural community, has an advantage over isolated villages due to its scale, enhanced connectivity, and resilience. Second is Security. TransCOM, will benefit from greater security. These bigger rural communities will be more secure, prosperous, and thriving because they can pool resources, attract investment, and sustain social cohesion in ways that small, isolated settlements struggle to achieve. Among other security arrangements, TransCOM could have community policing, organize vigilante groups and/or collaborate with formal security agencies more effectively, reducing vulnerability to banditry and rural crime. Third is Prosperity through larger Market access: Bigger communities attract traders, transporters, and service providers, creating local markets that stimulate commerce. Isolated villages often lack this economic dynamism. This creates employment opportunities: TransCOM will sustain agro-processing centers, cooperatives, and small industries, providing jobs beyond subsistence farming. Finally, infrastructure investment: governments and NGOs are more likely to invest in schools, clinics, and roads in larger communities, where the impact reaches more people.
You held a two-day workshop recently, what new insights or lessons did you gain from the speakers regarding project execution?
The two-day roundtable at IITA Ibadan, on the 5th and 6th of May, was genuinely productive, and I came away with a sharper view on a few things. The most consistent theme from practitioners who have executed comparable programmes was the primacy of governance architecture. It is easy to get excited about physical infrastructure and financing, and both matter enormously, but the programmes that fail tend to fail at governance: unclear decision rights, misaligned incentives between programme operators and host communities, and insufficient community ownership of outcomes. The speakers were emphatic that the governance structure has to be designed with as much rigour as the financial model. A second theme that was dominant was that of security. Given that the communities would be set up in rural areas, participants who have invested heavily in agriculture and agro-processing were vocal about the need to ensure security. So much so that it was adopted as an eight overarching pillar in support of every other intervention. The third insight was around sequencing. There is a temptation, when you have a comprehensive programme, to try to do everything at once. The experienced practitioners in the room, particularly those who had worked on similar initiatives in other African contexts counselled strongly for a sequenced approach that establishes commercial viability first. Once the hub is generating economic activity that community members can see and touch, everything else, the social services, the digital layer, the export linkages become easier to build and to fund. The fourth, and perhaps the most personally compelling, was on the importance of anchor enterprise quality. A hub’s character is shaped significantly by the values and operational standards of its anchor. That reinforced our conviction that the selection of anchor enterprises is not just a commercial decision but also a programme design decision with long-term consequences for the communities involved. Those lessons are already shaping how we structure the next phase of the programme.
What inspired you to start this initiative?
The honest answer is years of accumulated experience tinged with frustration but an unyielding resolve to see faster progressand to end poverty in the land. Having spent decades in the development space, I kept encountering the same structural problems: First, Foundational and Persistent challenges: The absence of basic infrastructure which defines the notion of “Rural”. This has led to the persistent crisis of rural-urban migration. It is an age-old problem. Second, is the Youth out-migration leading to community human capital decline, and the lack of rural industrialization which defined the earlier Proto-Industrial Revolution in Britain and Europe. Third, Living and Business Challenges: These include housing shortage, lack of schools and healthcare, and the absence of sustainable small businesses which has increased the already significant rural challenges. Fourth is depreciating assets: The economic strength of rural communities in Nigeria incudes vast natural resources such as minerals and agriculture including crops, livestock and forestry all of which are being destroyed through banditry and terrorism. Farmers cannot farm. Bandits are destroying the social fabrics of once cohesive society and making development impossible. A TransCOM is a relatively resilient ecosystem consisting of several villages and thousands of people. It is easier to police. It reduces the isolation that invites external marauders. There is strength in numbers. I am from Ogbomoso. I understand viscerally the gap between what communities produce and what they capture in value. Ogbomoso has one of Nigeria’s most significant cashew-producing belts. It has leather workers, food processors, and a dense network of informal enterprises. Yet value capture remains stubbornly low because the linkages, to standards, to finance, to markets are missing.
That is not a natural condition. It is a structural failure with a structural solution.
The other inspiration is intellectual. I subscribe to the credo by Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” I have long engaged with and carried out research on development. I have argued consistently that industrialization is not spontaneous, it requires deliberate state and institutional action to shift production structures. TransComs is my attempt to operationalize those ideas in the Nigerian context, at a scale that is achievable with the right partnerships. We all know the Nigerian Constitution states something similar but in practice, it has not prevented deep and damaging poverty and inequality. The law does not address the root causes of poverty and desperation that has driven individuals and communities intosuch extreme deprivation for decades.
How does the Southwest Development Commission fit into the initiative?
The Southwest Development Commission is a critical institutional anchor for TransComs in the region. Earlier this year, we presented the TransComs framework to the Commission, and they agreed to jointly imp;ement the programme with our organization, Foundation for Innovation Technology and Sustainable Development. We are presently working with two pilot sites: Fapote in Oyo State, as the anchor enterprise; and Ibarapa, also in Oyo State. The commission’s role is significant for several reasons. First, it provides political legitimacy and a cross-state mandate that no single state government can provide. Southwest industrialisation is inherently a regional project as supply chains do not respect state boundaries, and the infrastructure case is stronger when made at the regional level. Second, the SWDC can mobilise land, institutional support, and public investment in ways that accelerate private participation. Third, the Commission’s endorsement creates the policy scaffolding that major development finance institutions and multilateral partners look for before committing capital. We are working to deepen this partnership as we move from the approval phase into active implementation. The ambition is for the SWDC to serve as the programme’s regional convening authority, coordinating across Oyo, Ogun, Lagos, Osun, Ekiti, and Ondo States, ultimately scaling the TransComs model across all 137 local government areas in the Southwest.
How do you plan to develop the proposed digital infrastructure and hubs?
The digital infrastructure layer is not an afterthought; it is architecturally central to what makes a TransCom different from a conventional market or processing facility. We are designing a three-tier framework we call the Alaafia AI architecture, which integrates intelligent agronomy and production support, community intelligence for market information and logistics, and a mobile-based development interface for enterprise and social services. At the physical layer, each hub will have reliable broadband connectivity, digital transaction infrastructure, point-of-sale, mobile money integration, digital identity anchoring, and data capture systems that feed into quality certification and traceability platforms. These are the minimum standards for participation in any serious export value chain today. The hub development process follows a phased approach. We begin with the physical site in Ogbomoso, LAUTECH’s Architecture Department has been engaged for the master planning of the Fapote site. Phase one focuses on agro-processing and cooperative structuring. Phase two introduces the full digital layer alongside enterprise development services. Phase three scales to connectivity with the broader regional network of TransCom hubs. We are in active conversations with technology partners, including cloud infrastructure providers and agritech platforms, and we are positioning these hubs to integrate with Nigeria’s emerging digital public infrastructure stack, drawing on lessons from India’s DPI experience, which offers a strong comparative model for deploying digital infrastructure at population scale. We hope TransCOM will address the continuing loss of young people in peri-urban areas that has consistently been one of the top challenges of rural industrialisation. The persistent exodus of secondary and university graduates represents the loss of the future. We hope to create space for retaining young people but also attracting new younger adult residents. We will encourage the participation of National Youth Service members, including doctors, teachers, agriculturists and engineers, among others in all TranCOM.
Given the scale of the project, how will funding be secured and sustained?
TransComs is explicitly designed as a blended finance programme not dependent on any single funding source. Our financial model is based on a mix of public and private investment that ensures sustainability. The funding architecture has three main pillars. The first is public sector anchoring: state and federal government contributions, SWDC allocations, and potential integration with the Presidential Agro-Industrial Development Initiative (PADI) and similar federal programmes provide a credible public backstop that de-risks private investment. The second pillar is development finance: we are actively engaging with multilateral development banks, bilateral development agencies, and impact investment platforms. The programme’s design, with its emphasis on measurable outcomes, standards compliance, and replicable units, is well-suited to the investment criteria of institutions like the African Development Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and the UK’s BII, among others. The third pillar is private sector participation, structured through what we call a Partner-Operator model. Anchor enterprises which are businesses with a genuine stake in the communities, the hubs will contribute capital, technical capacity, and market linkages in exchange for preferential positioning within the TransCom ecosystem. Sustainability comes from the commercial activity of the hubs themselves: processing revenues, market fees, digital service subscriptions, and cooperative returns. TransComs are not charity projects, they are productive economic units designed to generate surpluses.
There is an ongoing TransComs pilot — can you explain how it is funded, the challenges faced so far, and its likelihood of completion?
The Ogbomoso pilot is at a decisive moment, which is part of why we convened our Launch Roundtable this month. The five hectares site at Fapote, granted through the goodwill and foresight of the Oba of Fapote, is secured. Institutional endorsements are in place, the master planning process has been initiated, and the foundational work is done. Funding for the pilot phase has been a combination of promoter resources, in-kind contributions from institutional partners, and early-stage commitments from a small group of aligned investors. It is honest to say that the pilot has been running lean, which is not unusual for a programme of this ambition at the pre-institutional funding stage. What we are doing now, through the roundtable and the ongoing partner recruitment process, is transitioning from that lean early phase into properly capitalised implementation. The challenges have been instructive. Coordinating across multiple state actors and communities takes more time than a purely private project. Building the trust architecture, with traditional rulers, with local government, with communities themselves, is not something you can shortcut. And mobilising institutional investment requires a level of documentation and due diligence that takes significant capacity to produce. We have invested heavily in that documentation. The likelihood of completion? I would say high, with the qualification that ‘completion’ in a programme like this is iterative. The pilot will produce a working, operational hub. It will also produce lessons that refine the model for replication. That is honest ambition.
Do you think stakeholders in Southwest Nigeria will embrace the initiative?
The signal we have received, consistently, is positive and I say that not as optimism but as observation. The response from traditional rulers, including the Soun of Ogbomosho and Oba of Fapote whose land grant made the Ogbomoso site possible, has been enthusiastic. Several such sentiments were relayed during the launch. The response from state governments, who sent their representatives to the roundtable has been constructive. The response from the business community, particularly agro-processors, DFIs and exporters who understand the value chain constraints we are addressing, has been genuinely encouraging. What I think people respond to is that TransComs is not asking communities to trust abstraction. It is a concrete proposition: here is the site, here is what will be built, here is who the anchor enterprise is, here is the governance structure. That specificity builds confidence. There are, of course, sceptics and I respect that. Nigeria has seen many well-intentioned development programmes that did not deliver. TransCOM has taken onboard the lessons and learningfrom past failures. Our job is to demonstrate, through the Ogbomoso pilot, that this one is different. Once we have a functioning hub producing measurable outcomes, farmers processing at better margins, young people with skills and enterprise, communities with better access to digital services, the conversation with sceptics changes entirely. The roundtable we just held at IITA Ibadan brought together community leaders, investors, government officials, and development partners. The quality of engagement confirmed that the appetite is real. Already there were clear intentions from participants to convert that appetite into formal commitments.
Are there clear timelines for completion, or is this a long-term project?
Both, in honest terms. TransComs is a long-term programme by design as scaling across 137 LGAs in the South-West over multiple years is not a short sprint. But within that long arc, we have very clear short-term milestones that keep us accountable. For the Ogbomoso pilot, the immediate timeline runs through 2025 and into 2026: master planning finalisation, groundbreaking, and the first phase of infrastructure development. We aim to have the core processing and cooperative infrastructure operational within 12 months of formal groundbreaking. Hopefully, construction of other TransCOM sites will run concurrently. The digital layer rolls out in parallel with capacity building programmes for community enterprises. At the programme level, we are working toward a phased expansion framework. Quarters one and two are proof-of-concept with Fapote and Ibapara demonstrating the model. By the end of the year we intend for replication across the first tranche of LGAs, with institutional infrastructure such as a programme secretariat, monitoring systems, and a dedicated fund structure in place. By year end, we intend to have a TransCom active in each of the southwest states, scaling numbers, services, integration and program reach over the next five years. The discipline of timelines matters because development programmes that live permanently in “the long term” lose accountability. We are deliberate about breaking the ambition into tangible, fundable, deliverable phases with each one meaningful in its own right, yet clearly building toward the larger goal.
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