From feasibility study to N50bn government commitment: the economist connecting research to infrastructure investment in Nigeria

By Tosin Clegg

When the Gombe State Government announced a N50 billion infrastructure commitment for the Wawa-Zange Grazing Reserve earlier this year, the decision traced back to a 62-page feasibility report written by a Nigerian economist whose interest in rural infrastructure began during his mandatory youth service at a river basin authority over a decade ago. Michael Abimbola Ogbe is not the kind of name that appears in government press conferences. But his analytical work, produced under a USAID-funded Mercy Corps program between 2022 and 2023, informed the state government’s investment planning, and the federal government subsequently signalled N120 billion in support for Gombe’s agro-livestock development program.
Ogbe’s connection to water infrastructure is not recent. In 2009, he was posted to the Upper Niger River Basin Development Authority for his national youth service year, where he got his first exposure to the realities of rural water infrastructure planning in northern Nigeria. It was there, he says, that he understood how wide the gap was between what rural communities needed and what the existing analytical tools could deliver. He went into private banking after that, then business school in London, then a doctoral program in China studying conflict economics. The career does not follow a straight line. But looking back, every turn fed into the work that would eventually land on the Gombe State Governor’s desk.
The Wawa-Zange Grazing Reserve sits in one of Nigeria’s most violent corridors. The Human Rights Watch World Report 2025 documented that a single assault in Plateau State in December 2023 killed approximately 140 people, triggering clashes that left 865 dead and over 15,000 displaced by February 2024. The International Organization for Migration reported over 1.3 million people internally displaced across Nigeria’s North-Central and Northwest regions by April 2024. It is in this context that Ogbe’s feasibility report matters. The document does not treat the reserve as a simple infrastructure site. It integrates water canalization with renewable energy, livestock economics, environmental safeguarding, and conflict-sensitivity into a single framework. The report proposes a 35.95-kilometer canal from the Gongola River, specified solar-powered pumps to replace diesel infrastructure, and included a solar mini-grid business case that meets commercial viability thresholds for off-grid energy investment in the region. The Secretary to the Gombe State Government publicly commended the work in May 2023, months before the state government committed budget resources to it.
But the Wawa-Zange project is one piece of a broader pattern that makes Ogbe’s career trajectory worth examining. The same economist who produced the canalization framework also developed a warehouse receipt and grain bank microfinance model that has been operating in farming communities around the Federal Capital Territory since 2022. The model converts stored grain into recognized loan collateral for smallholder farmers, a population that the Central Bank of Nigeria’s own data shows receives less than 5 percent of total commercial bank credit. Operational records from Overpass Solutions, the advisory firm implementing the model, show repayment rates that consistently outperformed every major government agricultural lending program across three harvest-to-sale cycles. By comparison, the CBN’s own agricultural intervention programs had recovered barely half of the N2.07 trillion disbursed to beneficiaries as of September 2023.
Separately, an anti-corruption framework Ogbe had been working on since 2021 was used as the basis for a four-day training program for 100 officials of the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation in December 2023. The OAGF is the treasury of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The curriculum connected anti-corruption mechanisms to the specific operational stages of budget execution rather than presenting compliance as a separate administrative function, and was delivered by Ayemere & Associates Consults with participation from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. A development partner organization operating donor-funded programs in Nigeria subsequently revised its internal procurement procedures in 2024 drawing on the same framework.
The Institute of Management Consultants Nigeria awarded Ogbe its highest membership grade, the FIMC fellowship, in 2024. Prado Power, an off-grid energy company that won the Humanitarian Grand Challenge in 2020, used his financial modeling on two of their solar energy projects.
What ties these disparate threads together is a pattern that development finance practitioners rarely achieve: research that becomes practice. The anti-corruption framework became an OAGF training curriculum. The grain bank model became an operating lending program. The Wawa-Zange feasibility study became a government infrastructure commitment. In a country where the gap between academic research and institutional application is often measured in decades, Ogbe has closed it in years. Whether the Wawa-Zange canalization materializes at the scale the state government has committed to, and whether the grain bank model can replicate beyond the FCT, remain open questions. What is no longer in question is whether the analytical work behind them has substance. The institutions that adopted it have answered that.