AGRA

By Aggie Asiimwe Konde

Starting this weekend, Dakar will once again become the capital of Africa’s food future. Leaders of government, farmers’ organizations, scientists, private sector executives, and global partners will gather in the Senegalese capital for the Africa Food Systems Forum, the continent’s largest stage for debating how to feed itself.

The gathering comes at a moment of extraordinary pressure. Food prices remain stubbornly high. Climate shocks are becoming harsher and more frequent. Millions of Africans still cannot afford a healthy meal each day. And yet, beneath the anxiety lies a quieter truth: there has been progress, uneven but undeniable, in the long struggle to transform Africa’s agriculture.

At the center of this contested terrain stands AGRA, the agency that was created in 2006 with the ambition of driving a smallholder-led agricultural transformation. Over the past 19 years, AGRA has become both a symbol of the continent’s quest to feed itself, and a lightning rod. For many, AGRA embodies the promise of an Africa that feeds itself. For others, it has become a convenient target, blamed for what remains unfinished and criticized by ideological opponents who see it as a bulwark against their unstated, obscure interests.

AGRA welcomes critical conversations on African agriculture. Questioning, challenging, and debating are essential to progress in a complex endeavor such as fighting hunger and malnutrition. But those discussions must be grounded in facts, context, and the lived realities of Africa’s 33 million smallholder farmers. Too often, critiques echo paternalism, suggesting that Africans lack the agency or capacity for self-determination, even when they are leading their own transformation.

A world turned upside down

To judge AGRA’s record fairly, one must step back from polemics and examine the evidence. The past five years have been among the most turbulent in modern agricultural history.

The Covid-19 pandemic shut down borders and markets. The war in Ukraine choked off vital flows of wheat, maize, and fertilizer. Climate extremes, from prolonged droughts in the Horn of Africa to devastating floods in West Africa, destroyed harvests. These shocks have pushed food prices to heights unseen in decades. Global food inflation peaked at 13 percent in 2023 and in low-income countries, many in Africa, it soared to 30 percent. For households already spending most of their income on food, such spikes were catastrophic.

The latest United Nations report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition (SOFI) confirms what Africans already know: hunger is not receding fast enough. Nearly six in 10 Africans live with some level of food insecurity, double the global average. More than one billion cannot afford a healthy diet, a number that has risen sharply since 2019. By 2030, the world is projected to have 512 million chronically undernourished people, almost 60 percent of them in Africa. Yet deeper insight tells us that the crisis today is not only about scarcity of food, it is also about affordability. Poverty, inequality, currency devaluations, and dependency on imports have turned every global shock into a household crisis.

Progress that is real, but unfinished

Against this backdrop, AGRA’s work looks much less like the failure that critics keep trumpeting and more like steady but incomplete progress. Since its founding, AGRA has supported the release of more than 700 improved crop varieties, many bred to resist drought, pests, and disease. It has worked with African governments to reform seed and fertilizer markets, slash tariffs, and harmonize regulations across regional blocs. These changes reduced transaction costs and expanded access to farm inputs. Partnerships with banks and agro-dealers have unlocked credit and extended distribution networks into villages once cut off from formal markets.

Independent evaluations bolster AGRA’s impact. Mathematica, a United States-based research firm, has been assessing AGRA’s 2023–2027 strategy, conducting baseline surveys in focus countries through mid-2025. In-person interviews with smallholders and entrepreneurs validate secondary data from Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other sources, aiming to measure yield increases and income growth.

Early findings are striking. In Nigeria, for example, some 63,897 metric tons of certified seeds were sold in 2024. More than 6,800 community-based advisors were trained, boosting improved seed adoption to 52 percent nationally. Private seed companies saw a 30 percent capacity increase, with small-pack distributions driving 40 percent sales growth.

In Kenya, AGRA’s Strengthening Regenerative Agriculture (STRAK) initiative in arid counties supported over 118,000 farmers. In Kitui, a semi-arid district in South Eastern Kenya, every shilling invested returned more than five in benefits. Across the continent, 40 percent of targeted farmers adopted nutrient-dense or climate-smart varieties, backed by USD2.47 million in grants. Kenya has emerged as a leader, integrating regenerative practices into county plans to combat soil degradation.

The economic impacts are tangible too. In Ethiopia, 302,000 farmers accessed improved seed, while school feeding programs reached 385,000 learners with biofortified foods, improving nutrition. At the 2024 Africa Food Systems Forum, AGRA mobilized USD13 billion through government-led programs, underscoring the potential of coordinated investment.

In policy reform, AGRA has supported national seed investment plans in six countries and scaled the Seed Systems Assessment Tool (SeedSAT), housed in its Center of Excellence for Seed Systems in Africa (CESSA). This tool identifies systemic gaps and guides reform efforts.

None of this is abstract. In Rwanda, Ghana, and Ethiopia, farmers adopting AGRA-backed seed and fertilizer packages have doubled their yields. For a maize farmer moving from half a ton per hectare to two, that is the difference between subsistence and a marketable surplus, between scraping by and sending a child to school.

But none of this progress has silenced AGRA’s critics. They point to the persistence of hunger on the continent, ignoring the global context and misrepresenting what hunger in Africa has become. The FAO data is unequivocal: the real crisis is affordability, not production. Even where yields have risen, incomes have not kept pace with food prices. Millions remain unable to afford diverse, nutritious diets.

AGRA has itself evolved in recognition of these realities. It no longer measures success by yields alone. Its new strategy places equal emphasis on building functioning markets, expanding inclusive finance, strengthening climate resilience, and deliberately empowering women and youth. Productivity is the beginning, not the end. Without roads, storage, processing, and fair markets, bumper harvests will not translate into better lives.

The change is visible in stories across the continent. In northern Ghana, farmer cooperatives that once sold maize cheaply at the farm gate now pool their produce and negotiate better prices with millers. In Rwanda, women who once relied on informal savings groups now run input dealerships, supplying improved seed and fertilizer to whole communities. In Kenya, young entrepreneurs are building digital platforms that connect farmers to markets by mobile phone, cutting out layers of middlemen. These are not isolated miracles. They are the fruit of steady, often invisible work to change systems.

The unfinished business of transformation

None of this is to deny how far there is to go. Africa’s population is growing rapidly. Climate change is intensifying. Debt crises are choking government budgets. The world is badly off track to achieving zero hunger by 2030. But to dismiss AGRA as irrelevant, or to ignore the gains made, is to abandon evidence in favor of ideology. Hunger is the product of conflict, inequality, weak infrastructure, fragile governance, and global market volatility. No single institution could possibly solve it alone.

What AGRA has done is create the conditions under which progress becomes possible: better seeds, fairer policies, stronger markets, and empowered farmers. The challenge now is to scale that progress, deepen it, and sustain it against the tide of global shocks.

This is why the Dakar forum matters. It is a testing ground for whether Africa and its partners can move beyond cynicism to action. The stakes are not abstract. They are measured in families deciding whether to eat once or twice a day. They are measured in the dreams of young Africans deciding whether to stay on the land or join the urban jobless. They are measured in the dignity of households seeking not handouts but the means to thrive.

The choice before us

Ultimately, one thing should be clear. Africa’s agricultural transformation is not a myth. It is unfinished business. The farmers who have doubled their yields, the women who have become entrepreneurs, the youth who have turned technology into opportunity, are living proof that change is possible.

As the world gathers in Dakar, it must choose between cynicism and solidarity. Solidarity is, by far, what this moment demands. With less than five years to 2030, there is no time left for endless arguments about ideology. The continent’s farmers have shown that with the right support they can drive their own transformation. The question is whether governments, donors, and partners will have the courage to finish the job.

Africa’s agricultural transformation is not dead. It is alive, and growing. And in the streets of Dakar, amid debate and decision, the seeds of its future will be sown again.

Ms Konde is the Director Communications, Innovations, External Engagements and Advocacy at AGRA – an African-led organization focused on putting farmers at the centre of the continent’s growing economy.