AFEX Commodities Exchange Limited at the weekend said it has grown from 5 warehouses in 3 states in northern Nigeria to 45 warehouses in 13 states across the country since its commencement of formal business operations in 2014.
This is according to Ayodeji Balogun, who is the country manager of AFEX in Nigeria, overseeing all transactions in the company’s warehousing facilities, where world-class business processes are applied in the grading, receiving and management of grains.
AFEX is Nigeria’s first private commodities exchange licensed in 2014 by the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) to provide a structured market for the transparent trading of agricultural commodities between farmers, traders, exporters and processors in West Africa, starting in Nigeria.
Balogun said “the company’s goal is to make a direct impact on the livelihoods of one million Nigerian farmers by the end of the year 2020,” according to a statement issued at the weekend by Farhat Kunmi Olayiwola, shared services analyst for AFEX.
Under the supervision of SEC, AFEX Nigeria is currently working with key players in the Nigerian capital market to create products that rely on commodities as the underlying asset for public investment.
At the capital market committee meeting which held on August 15, 2017 in Lagos, AFEX Nigeria announced the launch of its electronic trading platform, NASDAQ OMX Trading System, which will support offsite trades between agriculture and financial market players.
This is expected to go a long way in deepening the Nigerian financial market, and unlocking the much needed liquidity in the country’s agricultural sector.
In its effort to build a strong trust ecosystem between players in the market, the company runs a system similar to that deployed in the banking sector for receiving and managing cash, where both buying and selling parties rely on the exchange’s transparency as a counter party in their trades.
Through this platform or interface, individual smallholder farmers can now contribute their small grain volumes, as low as 100 kilogram bags, which are aggregated to directly fulfill supply contracts in thousands of metric tonnes (‘000mt) listed on the exchange by mills and investors.
