Annual Meetings 2025: agriculture illustrates the potential of African capital
"Making Africa’s Capital Work Better for Africa’s Development", the theme of the 2025 Annual Meetings, is starkly exemplified in the agricultural sector. Three flagship initiatives of the African Development Bank Group—the Agricultural Hubs, the Emergency Food Aid Programme, and the Dakar 2 Commitments—showcase how effectively mobilizing natural, human, and financial resources can drive transformative development across the continent.
“Collecting and consolidating our agricultural products has been an informal process for many years. Now, thanks to the 2PAI-Bélier project, our parents are in a better position to produce, transport and market their crops.” This is how Roland Koffi N’Goran, the spokesperson for an agricultural cooperative in Tiébissou, in central Côte d’Ivoire, sums up the impact of two agricultural consolidation centres built to benefit producers in the region.
The centres, built as part of Cote d’Ivoire’s first agricultural hub, are genuine commercial service platforms for producers, buyers and consumers. Funded by the African Development Bank, the hub symbolizes the steady transformation of the country’s agricultural sector. The programme is also being rolled out to Guinea, Mali, Madagascar, Senegal, Togo and Ethiopia, where it is offering unexpected opportunities for small producers. In Nigeria, home to the largest programme, the first phase involved seven states in producing and marketing cocoa, rice, cassava and tomatoes, among other crops.
To enhance agricultural productivity and competitiveness while reducing logistics costs, the African Development Bank Group launched the Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zones (SAPZ) initiative. The Bank has invested $1.1 billion, securing co-financing from partners such as the Islamic Development Bank, IFAD, Afreximbank, the EU, and EXIM Bank Korea.
So far, 27 special zones have been established across 13 countries. For nearly a decade, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank Group, has championed this programme as a key tool in tackling Africa’s severe food insecurity.
“These special zones will transform Africa into an industrial powerhouse for food and agriculture. They will help release Africa’s full agricultural potential. They will support regional and international trade in food and agricultural products. And they will open up new paths to prosperity,” emphasized President Adesina.
An emergency facility
The African Development Bank swiftly set up the African Emergency Food Production Facility to avoid disruptions to the continent’s food supply following the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022. This unprecedented initiative, which received $1.5 billion in funding, has helped small African farmers to cover the food gap. Certified seeds and high-quality agricultural inputs, including fertilizers, have been made available to millions of farmers in 33 African countries.
Two years after its launch, the initiative has borne fruit. In Burundi, Marie-Thérèse Nahabaganwa is President of the Tsindinzara (“Beat hunger” in Kirundi) cooperative in the Muhara and Kagera–Ruhohera valleys, covering an area of 200 hectares. The cooperative has received six tonnes of hybrid maize, agricultural inputs and technical supervision, and produced 800 tonnes of maize in 2023-2024, at a rate of four tonnes per hectare. “We owe these exceptional results to the combination of efforts by the local administrative authorities and the support of the projects funded by the African Development Bank,” says a delighted Marie-Thérèse.
From Senegal to Guinea and Djibouti, the African Food Facility has helped small farmers to increase their yields significantly.
National compacts
Using high-impact technologies is now crucial for developing agriculture in Africa. The launch of its flagship programme “Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation” (TAAT) in 2018 helped the African Development Bank Group to persuade financial partners and the private sector to invest more to increase agricultural productivity and support infrastructure and climate-smart agricultural systems, with investments throughout the value chain. Its aim is to help Africans feed themselves.
It was in the wake of this initiative that the Dakar 2 “Feed Africa” Summit took place in Dakar in January 2023. In the Dakar Declaration on food sovereignty and resilience, the Heads of State and Government of 34 African countries committed to increasing financing from national budgets to support Country Food and Agriculture Delivery Compacts in line with the Malabo Declaration. This aimed to accelerate agricultural growth and transformation for shared prosperity and improved livelihoods by allocating at least 10 percent of public expenditure to agriculture.
These three transformational initiatives – agricultural hubs, the emergency facility and national compacts – demonstrate how Africa can make its capital work better for the continent’s development. By generating value from its natural resources through agro-industrial processing zones, mobilizing its human capital by providing technical support to farmers, and optimizing its financial resources through public commitments and partnerships, Africa is on the path towards a long-term structural transformation.
The results are clear: more efficient value chains, increased productivity and better food resilience. This integrated approach, supported by the African Development Bank Group and its partners, illustrates how Africa can take charge of its agricultural and food future, by creating an endogenous, inclusive development model.
Cover photo: Three major initiatives launched by the African Development Bank with support from its partners over the last ten years have helped boost the development of the agricultural sector in Africa.
