Open Budgets and Cocoa Value Chain Allocations in South-West Nigeria (2021–2024)

Abstract

Cocoa remains one of Nigeria’s leading non-oil export commodities, with Ondo, Oyo and Ogun States playing important roles in national production. Sustaining the cocoa value chain depends on public investment, yet Nigeria’s fiscal transparency has fluctuated, with its Open Budget Survey score declining from 45 in 2021 to 31 in 2023. This study examines the openness, allocation and implementation of cocoa-related public spending across the three states. Adopting a qualitative, desk- and library-based design, the study analyses publicly available budget documents for 2021–2024 retrieved from the Nigeria Governors’ Forum digital repository and state government portals, supplemented by civil society and academic literature. An openness assessment and allocation-mapping exercise were used to identify agriculture and cocoa-specific budget lines and, where available, compare approved allocations with actual expenditure. Findings show that agriculture’s share of total state spending remains below the Maputo/Malabo 10% target, ranging from 2.04% in Ondo to 4.31% in Oyo. Cocoa-specific institutional allocations, including Ondo’s Cocoa Revolution Office and Oyo’s Tree Crops Development Unit, constitute a small fraction of agriculture budgets, while most capital spending targets broader agribusiness and rural infrastructure. Cocoa-related investment in Ondo also depends substantially on external and development-partner financing rather than domestic recurrent revenue. Where performance data are available, implementation varies markedly: by September 2021, Oyo’s agriculture sector had spent about 52% of its revised budget, compared with approximately 12% in Ogun. The study concludes that although published budget documents are reasonably open, they reveal persistent underfunding, limited commodity-specific allocations and uneven implementation. It recommends consistent publication of expenditure-actuals data, separate reporting of development-partner disbursements, and further investigation of divergent execution rates.