COUNTRY-LED, PEOPLE-POWERED
Catalytic Partnerships: Accelerating Change Through Collaboration
Catalytic Partnerships:
Accelerating Change Through Collaboration
Unlocking scale and innovation through strategic collaboration
AGRA’s impact is amplified by its ability to forge catalytic partnerships that transcend borders, sectors, and mandates. In 2024, AGRA deepened efforts to mobilize transformative resources, align diverse stakeholders, and co-create flagship initiatives with long-term potential. Through these partnerships and initiatives, AGRA plays a central role in shaping the agenda for inclusive agricultural transformation across Africa. The Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation in Africa (PIATA) is one of AGRA’s most significant platforms for aligning major donors and implementing partners around a shared vision for systemic impact. Although 2024 marked a transitional year for PIATA, it continues to represent a critical mechanism for scaling collaboration and driving multi-country transformation.
Strategic Initiatives: Driving Alignment and Innovation
To support and amplify its core work, AGRA reintroduced its strategic initiatives function in 2024, focused on:
These initiatives bring new resources, unlock systemic barriers, and foster continent-wide coordination on complex issues. All are aligned with AGRA’s outcomes framework and contribute to measurable progress on climate action (SDG 13), enhanced resilience, increased public-private investment, and regional trade.
Highlights from 2024
- Food systems and climate action: AGRA helped shape the implementation strategy for the COP28 UAE Declaration and joined the Technical Cooperation Collaborative as a founding member. Through this platform, AGRA is working with multiple African countries to strengthen national food systems strategies and NDCs by translating them into investible flagship initiatives, mobilizing climate financing, and enhancing coordination mechanisms that link food systems and climate action.
- Flagship initiatives: AGRA signed a 3-year MoU with the World Economic Forum as the regional lead for the Food Action Alliance, advancing country-led, public-private partnerships in food systems, including:
- Southern Africa Poultry Initiative: Development of a 5-year flagship program across SADC to strengthen poultry value chains and regional food security.
- African Adapted Crops: A new initiative supporting business development and resource mobilization around the commercialization of African heritage crops, with interest from donors in Germany and Switzerland, and from the Danish Novo Nordisk Foundation.
- Food Innovation Hub – Rwanda: Signed MoU with the Ministry of ICT and Innovation in Rwanda to support the development of a long-term national Food Innovation Hub strategy and 10-year business plan to attract public and private investment.
These initiatives are aligned with AGRA’s results framework and are expected to contribute to national efforts and broader continental goals over time.
- Africa Food Security and Trade Initiative: A flagship initiative that emerged from the 2022 US-Africa Leaders’ Summit continues to gain traction through high-level engagement with the AU and AGRA leadership.
- Green Climate Fund (GCF) Milestone: With groundwork laid in 2024, the RE-GAIN Program was approved in February 2025—the first GCF-funded climate adaptation and food loss and reduction program of its kind, set to benefit 2.6 million people across seven countries over the next five years.
- Building Momentum Through the Africa Food Systems Forum: The Africa Food Systems Forum continued to play a vital role in advancing AGRA’s continental agenda-setting, supporting national food systems strategies, facilitating investments, and promoting knowledge exchange. In parallel, AGRA conducted a brand health review, repositioning itself to reflect greater ambition and to engage a broader set of partners around shared food systems goals.
