What AGRA@20 has taught us about the work Africa needs now

The pressure is building across African food systems as fertiliser costs remain volatile, development finance for agriculture declines, and climate shocks hit farming communities faster than policy cycles can respond.

These pressures are real, and they are felt most acutely by the smallholder farmers whose livelihoods depend on systems that were already under strain.

It is against this backdrop that AGRA turns twenty. A milestone like this invites the question of what an organisation has learned.

I have spent much of this past year in conversation with the people closest to the work: permanent secretaries, women leaders in finance and agribusiness, farmer organisations, technical partners, and government teams implementing national strategies.

In Lusaka, a room of eighteen women from banking, media, and civil society challenged us directly on whether AGRA can bring the right instruments to the table, or whether we remain more comfortable convening than co-building.

In Limuru, senior officials from fourteen African countries sat together and spoke candidly about what is working in delivery and what remains stuck.

What I heard, again and again, is that the work of agricultural transformation is slower and more interconnected than any single intervention can address.

Soil health matters, but so does the policy environment that shapes what a farmer can afford to put into the ground.

Market access matters, but only if the roads, storage, and trade rules connect production zones to the people who need food.

Extension services matter, but they must be backed by data that reflects what is actually happening on farms.

Each of these elements depends on the others. When one breaks down, the whole chain feels it.

At AGRA, for over twenty years, we have learned that distributing seeds and fertiliser, while necessary, was never going to be sufficient on its own.

The harder, longer work is in building systems that hold together under pressure: linking climate adaptation to market development, connecting public investment to private sector participation, and helping governments strengthen the institutions that turn strategies into results.

And governments are at the centre of this. Every country I have engaged with in this role has its own priorities, its own constraints, its own politics.

What works in Sierra Leone's Feed Salone program looks different from Ethiopia's cluster-based approach or Nigeria's domestic rice strategy.

AGRA’s job is to walk alongside these efforts, to bring technical support, data, and convening power where they are needed, and to stay close enough to the ground that we can learn from what countries are doing.

Twenty have taught us something fundamental; agri-food systems transformation touches every part of a country’s economy: finance, trade, infrastructure, research, and policy.

Someone has to sit in the middle of that and help the pieces connect.

Someone has to hold the space where governments learn from each other, where private capital meets public strategy, where data reaches the people making decisions, and where smallholder farmers remain at the centre of it all.

It is a role the sector cannot afford to leave unfulfilled. It is what twenty years of learning and course correction have shaped AGRA to do.

"We keep going because the underlying truth has not changed: when farmers prosper, Africa prospers." — Alice Ruhweza, President, AGRA