Mansur Matazu, director-general of the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMET), says the agency is expanding its services to other sectors like maritime and agriculture to improve on its revenue.

Matazu said this in an interview with journalists on Thursday after the League of Airports and Aviation Correspondents (LAAC) 25th conference in Lagos.

He said meteorological services do not benefit only aviation, and NiMET aims to become a world-class agency by tapping into its full potential to earn better and improve on its procurement.

“Yesterday we discussed our major sources of funding. It comes from the aviation industry, it is part of our establishing act that we get funds from enroute charges, ticket charges and this makes us fairly very comfortable in terms of  acquiring infrastructure especially high tech equipment whether, in monitoring, forecasting and also simulation,” Matazu said

“Another window we are also experimenting with is diversification of our services as aviation is just one out of many that enjoy our services, we are expanding into marine observation and also our services into agriculture.

“We realize we have over 170m citizens of Nigerians that have access to handsets and we want to leverage on this to deliver our services to businesses especially to farmers and in collaboration with service providers we just attach a token.”

Matazu said the agency has begun establishing itself in other countries and generating some revenue from other African countries because of its visibility and relevance in the scheme of things but aims to do more.

He said Nigeria has become an African regional hub for the World Meteorological Organisation and the African Development Bank (AfDB) and it is attracting projects from other countries which have helped boost the agency’s revenue.

“We wanted NIMET to get visibility and for NIMET to get relevance and offering of services to countries like Liberia, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Mozambique, and Gambia ab-initio it was under the voluntary country partnership of World Meteorological Organization (WMO),” he said.

“We were offering the services for free initially it now gave us very huge visibility, relevance and now presently United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is sponsoring our information in the Gambia we have been there for two years and we are getting some funding from that and also the WMO and African Development Bank (AfDB) are making Nigeria an African regional hub, assisting other countries and bringing other projects.  It has given us a window, relevance, and an opportunity to greatly affect our revenue.”