Pan-African agricultural development agency AGRA has struck a string of new partnerships with five African and international organisations, aiming to move Africa’s food systems beyond isolated projects and towards a shared agenda built around what farmers actually earn.
The agreements were formalised in the Rwandan capital as this year’s Africa Food Systems Forum wound down after four days of talks that drew delegates, financiers and policymakers from across the continent to the Kigali Convention Centre. The partners are TradeMark Africa, the African Union Development Agency-NEPAD, the Islamic Organisation for Food Security, the International Fertilizer Development Center and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition.
AGRA President Alice Ruhweza said the next phase of agricultural transformation must move beyond isolated interventions. What is needed, she said, is a renewed alliance that brings together capabilities across governments, businesses and research institutions—one that turns decades of agricultural progress into lasting farmer prosperity.
The partnerships are AGRA’s response to findings in its Impact, Learning and Foresight Report, launched in Nairobi at the end of August to mark AGRA’s 20th anniversary. The report identifies three traps holding back the continent’s farmers. A productivity trap keeps yields low, while a value trap means farmers capture too little of what their produce is eventually worth.
A capability trap leaves the institutions meant to support transformation too weak to sustain it. AGRA says the new partnerships are designed to address all three by putting farmer income at the centre of programming, strengthening what it calls Africa’s Knowledge Hub for better decision-making, and opening pathways that can attract investment capital at the scale the sector needs.
Two of the five agreements demonstrate how specific that ambition is intended to become. AGRA and the International Fertilizer Development Center signed a three-year memorandum of understanding covering seed-system development—from policy and certification to digitalisation—alongside work on climate-smart farming practices, soil health and access to finance for agro-dealers and small enterprises. Bayella Thiam, the fertiliser institute’s chief operating officer, called the agreement a significant milestone in scaling impact across agricultural systems.
The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition signed a letter of intent built around five areas, chief among them integrating nutrition into AGRA’s investment decisions and the food systems forum’s strategic direction, alongside work on gender inclusion and nutrition-linked job creation. Ruhweza framed the rationale bluntly, telling the forum that no single organisation can close the gap between Africa’s farms and its plates. Her GAIN counterpart, Lawrence Haddad, has separately noted that the number of Africans unable to afford a healthy diet passed the one-billion mark in 2024, demonstrating the scale of the problem the partnership is intended to address.
Two other signatories bring different forms of reach. TradeMark Africa, formerly TradeMark East Africa before it widened its mandate beyond the region in 2023, works to reduce the cost and time involved in moving goods across African borders. AUDA-NEPAD is the African Union’s development and technical implementation arm, responsible for taking programmes such as the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme from continental commitments to implementation at the country level.
AGRA was established in 2006 as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, a name it dropped in 2022 while retaining the acronym, following years of criticism over its original input-intensive approach to raising yields. Under Ruhweza, who succeeded Agnes Kalibata as president, the organisation has adopted a more explicitly income-focused approach, arguing that yield gains mean little to a farming household unless they translate into money in hand.
AGRA describes the new grouping as open-ended rather than limited to the five signatories. The renewed alliance, it says, is intended to give its wider network of partners a shared framework through which they can align their work around the same goal, rather than creating a fixed club of members.
For Kenya, whose smallholder farmers sit squarely within the productivity and value traps described in the report, the test of the Kigali agreements will be whether they improve financing and market access on the ground—not merely the language used to describe the problem.
Category: Business
Related Video: Beyond Aid: How Japan Is Shaping Kenya’s SME Future | JICA Training Experience
Related Explainer: Explainer: What happened to milk in Kenya?
Facebook
Twitter / X
WhatsApp
LinkedIn
Telegram
Reddit