Africa’s Food Future Hinges on Leadership: The Infrastructure We Can’t Afford to Ignore

As social entrepreneurs, philanthropic leaders, impact investors, and policy influencers convene at the Skoll World Forum, an annual platform dedicated to advancing systems-level solutions and scaling impact, this year’s focus on moving from ambition to results brings a critical question into perspective for Africa: why does strong policy ambition so often fail to translate into outcomes at scale?

Africa has never lacked ambition for its food systems. What it lacks is sufficient food systems leadership capacity to turn that ambition into results.

The Kampala Declaration, which took effect in January 2026, sets the agenda for the next decade, calling for inclusive, resilient, and sustainable agri-food systems across the continent. However, the African Union’s own Biennial Reviews of the just-concluded Malabo CAADP decade show that most countries were off track on the commitments they had already made, despite strong frameworks and political declarations.

Across Africa, ambitious strategies often stall at the point of execution. Coordination breaks down across ministries. System actors operate in parallel rather than in concert.

Promising innovations fail to scale because few actors seek to bridge policy, markets, and communities. Implementation gaps are often attributed to constraints such as a lack of financing, weak infrastructure, or market dynamics.

But unlocking these complex areas depends on the ability of leaders across diverse organisations to see the bigger shared picture, align goals, collaborate, and advance delivery in a coherent fashion. Food systems leadership isn’t about titles or personal power.

It’s about leaders in the ecosystem working across boundaries to coalesce around a common agenda, manage tough trade-offs, and push for collective action. Leadership programmes such as AGRA’s Centre for African Leaders in Agriculture (CALA) and the African Food Fellowship (AFF) help strengthen these capabilities: enabling leaders to move beyond their own mandates, connect diverse actors, build coalitions, and turn big ambitions into real, measurable change.

Where stronger food systems leadership exists, policies become impactful programmes, finance flows more effectively, and innovations scale. Where it does not, even substantial investments underperform.

Proof already exists – Africa can build transformational capabilities by design. Evidence increasingly points to one missing piece: a critical mass of leaders equipped to work systemically, bridging institutions, wiring stronger connections across the public, private, and civic sectors, and operating at all levels of governance.

Across initiatives such as the AFF, CALA, the African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD), and the Africa Capacity Building Foundation, leaders are being equipped with systems thinking, collaborative skills, implementation networks, and real-world delivery capacity grounded in country priorities. Leaders from these programmes are already demonstrating measurable results in strengthening delivery, influencing policy, and unlocking investment.

In Tanzania, embedding food systems leadership within delivery systems produced transformative results. A CALA-supported intervention reduced poultry mortality from 55% to 3% by organizing previously fragmented producers, input suppliers, and extension actors into a coordinated cluster production model that aligned incentives and improved adherence to best practices.

This approach improved coordination and execution, leveraging productivity gains that had eluded the sector for years. The success of this approach led to the team’s integration into national poultry sector reforms, now advancing through the Poultry Compact (2024–2028).

In Kenya, similar leadership capabilities are translating into large-scale economic outcomes. Through the African Food Fellowship, an aquaculture enterprise has mobilized partnerships across government, finance, and industry to unlock a long-standing financing gap in the sector.

AFF fellows worked with financial institutions to de-risk lending and coordinated actors across the aquaculture value chain. This led to the launch of Africa’s first dedicated aquaculture credit product and catalysed production expected to reach 25,000 MT annually by 2031, alongside 8,000 jobs and improved incomes for 10,000 smallholder farmers.

In both cases, the real breakthrough wasn’t just new technology or more funding; it was about bringing people together, aligning their interests, and driving collective action across the whole system. Critically, the impact of these initiatives extends beyond individual leaders.

When leaders are connected across countries and sectors, they form an organic movement for transformation. They share insights, coordinate action, and hold one another accountable.

The goal, therefore, is not just to train individuals but to forge a collective force of diverse leaders across the continent, capable of shifting policies, business models, and incentives at every level.

The return on investment Africa can’t ignore

Yet leadership remains among the least-funded components of food systems transformation. Estimates suggest that equipping 25,000 cross-sector food systems leaders across Africa over the Kampala Decade would require a modest US$25 million per year, roughly 0.1% of annual spending in Africa’s agrifood sector and just 0.25% of the total investment needed to achieve CAADP goals.

Stronger leadership capacity attracts substantial commercial finance ready to invest in Africa’s agrifood sectors and achieve greater impact by improving coordination, accountability, and execution. Food systems leadership, therefore, is not an additional cost but a multiplier that determines whether existing investments translate into results at scale.

To accelerate transformation delivery, food systems leadership initiatives are forming a community of practice to learn from one another, spotlight delivery gaps, connect their alumni networks, and collectively advocate for investment in leadership. This is a coordinated call to action, ready to scale what is already working to build a new generation of food system leaders.

Delivering on ambition: What it will take

As the Kampala decade gets underway, the question is no longer whether Africa has the right ambitions for food systems transformation, but whether it has the leadership capabilities to achieve them. This necessitates elevating food systems leadership to the pedestal of implementation and giving it top priority and funding from governments.

Development partners must also go beyond technical fixes and invest in the institutional and leadership capacity that turns commitments into real, measurable outcomes. Ecosystem actors must transition from dispersed efforts to coordinated action to deepen collaboration, align around common priorities, and advance food systems leadership capacity at scale.

The next step is to translate this momentum into actionable commitments at the 2026 Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali. Without this shift, ambition will continue to outpace execution. With it, Africa has a genuine chance to turn a decade of commitments into a decade of delivering food systems transformation.

By Alice Ruhweza, AGRA President, Debisi Araba, Managing Director – AKADEMIYA 2063 and Pascal Murasira, Executive Director at the African Food Fellowship.