When Alice Ruhweza steps into the president’s role at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA, this March, she inherits a decade of transformative agricultural leadership by her predecessor, Agnes Kalibata. Since 2014, Kalibata has steered AGRA from fragmented, siloed agricultural interventions to a more integrated approach that bridges research, policy, and private enterprise.
For too long, groundbreaking agricultural research has languished in laboratories, disconnected from the fields where innovation truly matters. Now, as AGRA transitions leadership, the imperative is clear: Translate scientific potential into systemic, sustainable solutions for Africa’s food systems.
Africa’s staggered green revolution
One of the first steps of a Green Revolution for Africa was a concerted push to introduce high-yield varieties of staple crops alongside fertilizers and irrigation to mirror the efforts that brought about a marked increase in food production in Asia. Given recurring hurdles on the African continent, including poor infrastructure and limited access to resources by producers, these interventions were unable to reach the required scale.
Recognizing this gap, government-led interventions with a wider scope and reach emerged as a critical driver of progress regarding distribution and connection across the value chain. Policies that prioritized agriculture, such as the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme and later the Malabo Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth, were instrumental in creating an enabling environment for investment and growth.
These frameworks encouraged countries to commit significant portions of their national budgets to agriculture while setting clear targets for poverty alleviation, job creation, and sustainability. Infrastructure projects and plans to develop networks for input distribution were set in motion but once again, systemic barriers, political instability, weak institutional frameworks, and fragmented markets dulled the impact of policy interventions.
We are now in 2025, inching closer to the timeframe for the achievement of the SDGs and the goals from the Malabo Declaration are yet to be attained, even as the AU pushes to adopt and implement the Kampala Ministerial Declaration on Migration, Environment and Climate Change.
Exploring the learnings from these previous phases has led to what I consider to be the most promising shift in Africa’s agricultural narrative — the rise of enterprises and business consortiums, bridging the gap between farmers, governments, and markets. These organizations, many of which have emerged through the support of AGRA and similar platforms, play a crucial role in addressing long-standing inefficiencies.
Still, for these private enterprises, the disaggregation of farmer communities, large acquisition costs, and deficient infrastructure present a significant challenge to scale. Transforming Africa’s food systems will require strategic collaboration and innovative financing approaches.
As early-phase results emerge, it is also key to consider critical financing gaps, given the inherent risks of agricultural investments. Agriculture is an unpredictable sector, with numerous variables beyond human control that can disrupt production cycles. Successfully advancing food system transformation demands patient capital that can withstand long development timelines and absorb potential setbacks. Financial mechanisms must be designed to support agricultural enterprises through extended periods of growth and uncertainty.
In line with this, we are seeing semicommercial funders such as development finance institutions and impact investors leading in driving deal flow — the push to generate a steady stream of investment opportunities. Over 70% of ag-tech deals over $1 million have at least one DFI or impact investor as a funder. Similarly, more nontraditional funding instruments are being adopted across the sector.
The head of the African Development Bank, Akinwunmi Adeshina, in conversation with World Bank President Ajay Banga, highlighted a framework for mobilizing patient capital to address Africa’s food security crisis. This framework involves the active participation of multilateral development banks, leveraging AAA ratings, to raise low-interest finance for the sector.
He also referenced the use of Special Drawing Rights to increase capital flows, and specifically the place of strategic alliances to achieve this, such as the AfDB-IMF Special Drawing Rights partnership that allows countries to leverage SDRs nearly up to four times their value to finance food system and poverty alleviation projects.
While SDRs continue to face significant difficulty in action, this framework underscores the necessity of reforms that should see MDBs creating projects and investing alongside private sector institutions and governments to subsume the inherent and perceived risk of financing the food system.
Africa’s Green Revolution is far from over. The initial phases of research, government intervention, and private-sector engagement have laid the groundwork for progress, but the true revolution lies ahead. Achieving a food-secure Africa will require not only continued investment in technology and infrastructure but also a cultural shift that places collaboration at the heart of every effort, seeing the sector as a whole system rather than individual parts that need to be solved separately. Stakeholders must be willing to share resources, insights, and risks, recognizing that the challenges of today demand collective solutions.
Engaging the continent’s youth, its largest demographic, will also be critical for ensuring the sector’s long-term dynamism and innovation.
Invariably, Africa’s youth, comprising over 60% of the population, represent the future of our food systems. With private enterprises at the fore of this revolution, a lot more opportunities for engaging our youth population across a range of activities become apparent with a lot of good to be reaped from their ability to bring fresh perspectives and drive growth.
AGRA’s president, Agnes Kalibata, has aptly noted that Africa’s agricultural challenges cannot be solved in isolation. In her persistent calls for stakeholder cooperation, she emphasizes uniting farmers, agribusinesses, researchers, and policymakers with the understanding that systemic change requires every link in the value chain to function cohesively.
Ultimately, Africa’s food system transformation will not come through isolated victories, but through partnerships that challenge the status quo. The seeds have been planted; it is now up to the continent’s stakeholders to nurture them into a thriving system that feeds not just Africa, but the world.
devex.com