A weather app Nigerian farmers can actually use

The problem

The Nigerian Meteorological Agency publishes its forecasts as low-resolution PDF bulletins — static images of cloud icons over a country map, pushed out at irregular intervals. For a Wisconsin farmer, this would be unthinkable. For a smallholder farmer in Kaduna trying to decide whether to plant this week, it is the status quo.

The technology gap is not a data gap. Modern open-source forecasting APIs — Open-Meteo, NOAA GFS, ECMWF — already cover Nigeria with hourly resolution. The gap is a delivery gap, and an interpretation gap, and a trust gap.

What I’m building

A web product that does three things NiMet’s bulletins do not:

1. Location-specific forecasts for the cities and farming corridors where they matter — Kaduna, Kano, Ibadan, Jos, Makurdi, Yola — at hourly resolution and seven-day lookahead.
2. Agricultural framing of the forecast: not “scattered showers” but “good window for planting maize tomorrow before 11 AM, soil moisture remains favorable through the weekend.”
3. Mobile-first delivery designed to load on a 3G connection in under two seconds, because that is the connection most users will have.

Where this is going

The first version is a static Astro site backed by serverless Cloudflare Workers calls to Open-Meteo. The next version adds SMS delivery for users without smartphones. The longer-term ambition includes locally-trained satellite-imagery models for crop-stress monitoring — and, eventually, owned satellite data infrastructure for the African continent.

I’m under no illusions about how hard the long arc is. The first product, though, is genuinely modest: take an excellent free API, add agricultural context, ship it fast, and prove that the tooling problem can be solved in a weekend by one person with a laptop.

If you’re a Nigerian farmer, an agronomist, or a developer who wants to help — the contact link is on the about page.