
Time to Invest in Africa’s Agriculture
By Beth Dunford
Published October 17, 2021
Though more than six out of every 10 people in Sub-Saharan Africa work in the continent’s agriculture sector, the pace of the continent’s agricultural growth is not keeping up with Africa’s population growth and around 246 million Africans go to bed hungry every night.
On this World Food Day in 2021, it is time for African and global leaders, as well as development organizations, to join the African Development Bank (AfDB)’s call for increased investments in agricultural technologies that boost Africa’s food production and food security in the face of climate change.
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The continent has immense potential to feed itself and to become a breadbasket to the world: about 65 percent of Earth’s remaining uncultivated, arable land is in Africa. However, that potential is threatened by erratic weather extremes. It is also stunted because a majority of African food growers are subsistence smallholder farmers. We need to scale up delivery of modern and climate-smart farming practices.
AfDB’s investments are helping African farmers put more food in the mouths of more Africans. Since AfDB launched its ‘Feed Africa Strategy’ in 2015, more than 74 million people are benefiting from access to improved agricultural technologies, resulting in higher food production.
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Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT), our flagship programme, has provided 11 million farmers across 29 African countries with proven agricultural technologies such as drought-resistant maize, heat-resistant wheat, higher-yielding seed varieties and seed treatments to protect against pests like the fall armyworm, which has been devastating African crops in waves of hungry, winged swarms.
Through TAAT, African food production has expanded by more than 12 million metric tonnes in just three years. TAAT has reduced Africa’s food imports worth US$814 million. We are on our way to reaching our target of reaching 40 million farmers with modern and climate-resilient technologies.
Aligned with the World Food Day 2021 theme–Our actions are our future. Better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life–AfDB is delivering higher food production, access to more nutritious foods and helping farmers adapt to environments impacted by climate change.
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AfDB’s Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa (AFAWA) initiative aims to reduce the access to financing gap women businesses face across the continent, including women working in agriculture.
AFAWA has just put US$20 million into a project on financing climate-resilient agricultural practices in Ghana. It will target hundreds of women-led enterprises through lines of credit with Ecobank Ghana, as well as provide them skills training on climate adaptive farming.
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At a recent ‘Feeding Africa’ event hosted by AfDB and the United Nations’ International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Rome, more than a dozen African heads of state and other world leaders endorsed the creation of a Financing Facility for Food and Nutrition in Africa. The Facility proposes a new approach to investing in agriculture and agri-business, based on five pillars:
- Scaling up of proven climate-adapted, science-based production and other technologies;
- Creating an enabling environment for enhancing agricultural production. Governments must commit to policy and regulation that facilitates access to modern technologies;
- Building critical backbone infrastructure linking production areas to markets and processing at African national and regional levels;
- Crowding in private-sector investments and access to finance. Private sector investment and business expertise will grow food supply chain commercial viability, as well as inclusion of more small and medium enterprises and smallholder farmers;
- Supporting an African special emergency assistance fund on famine and drought.
The Facility expects to mobilize US$1 billion over the next two years from green funds, bilateral and multilateral donors to support these pillars. We need more government, development partner, private sector and foundation “buy in” to scale up investments in this Facility.
AfDB envisages a food-secure Africa that uses advanced technologies, creatively adapts to climate change and develops a new generation of ‘agripreneurs’ — empowered youth and women who will modernize and industrialize agriculture.
The Financing Facility aims to accomplish that by bringing smart ‘agritech’ to help millions of more African farmers to double major crop yields, produce enough food to feed an additional 200 million people and reduce incidents of malnutrition.
Beth Dunford is Vice-President for Agriculture, Human and Social Development at African Development Bank