The starting point for food and agriculture was in the Garden of Eden. When God created Adam and Eve, he gave them all they needed to thrive. They lacked no food. They had a beautiful garden where God told them what to eat and not to eat. There was no hunger in the beginning. That means that the intent of God is for people to be fed.

We see this later when Jesus was with the disciples. While some disciples asked him to send the people away to go and fend for themselves, Jesus did not.

Instead, he multiplied loaves of bread and fish and fed five thousand people. When Jesus was tempted by the devil to turn stones into bread, he said, “Man shall not live by bread alone but by the word of God.” That means man must eat bread but should not only eat bread.

God did not make stomachs to be empty. He made them to be filled. So, my starting point is that food is a fundamental human right. It is so fundamental that the Bible enjoins that even your enemy should be fed.

Yet, for millions around the world, “All is not well.”

Today, globally, 783 million people are hungry. Africa alone has 288 million hungry people –a little over the population size of Nigeria. The number of hungry people is rising due to multiple shocks from climate change (with cyclones, floods and droughts), conflicts, geopolitical tensions, global food price inflation, food export restrictions, rising poverty, and inequality. 

Particularly worrying is malnutrition and stunting among children in Africa. Both malnutrition and stunting severely affect cognitive ability, reduce learning and performance, and negatively affect long-term economic opportunities.

In such a world, we desperately need visionary and passionate leaders who are strategic solution providers. We need transformational change makers. My own faith and upbringing helped me recognize early on that to deal with these critical challenges; it is important and necessary to radically transform agriculture. By this, we must move agriculture from simply being a way of life to a viable, sustainable, lucrative, and wealth-creating business.

Essentially, food is money. The size of Africa's food and agriculture market will reach $1 trillion by 2030. Therefore, if agriculture is well managed, it will create massive wealth, incomes and jobs for Africa.  And it should. Africa has 65% of the uncultivated arable land left in the world to feed 9.5 billion people by 2050. Therefore, what Africa does with agriculture will determine the future of food in the world.

Agriculture is also critical for the diversification of economies and for the transformation of rural areas, where over 70% of the population of Africa lives, and where many people live in poverty. Therefore, It is clear that Africa cannot eliminate poverty unless we transform agriculture.

That is why when I was first elected President of the African Development Bank Group in 2015 (and I must add, the first Nigerian to be elected President of the Bank since its creation in 1964), I made transforming Africa my topmost priority. My vision for Africa, called the High 5s, are: Light Up and Power Africa; Feed Africa; Integrate Africa; Industrialize Africa; and improve the quality of life of the people of Africa. In the past seven years, these High 5s have impacted the lives of over 400 million people.

To feed Africa, we launched a $25 billion program to transform agriculture. Our goal is to provide high-performing agricultural technologies for 40 million farmers and make Africa food self-sufficient by 2030. We are well on our way towards achieving this goal.

Our flagship program, Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT), brings together global agricultural research centers, national and regional agricultural research organizations, and the private sector, to deliver high-performing agricultural technologies at scale to millions of farmers.

Let me share with you some of the successes we are achieving. To help Africa tackle the negative effects of rising temperatures from climate change, we supported researchers to develop crop varieties that are tolerant or resistant to hot weather.

One such example is heat-tolerant wheat varieties. We provided over 100,000 tons of seeds of these heat-tolerant wheat varieties to farmers in Ethiopia.

To get a sense of what that means, let’s consider that the biggest airplane, the Airbus A380, with passengers, cargo and fuel, weighs 98.4 tons. That means 100,000 tons of the seeds is equivalent to 1,016 A380 aircraft on a landing strip!

In turn, the government of Ethiopia boldly supported its farmers to grow 5,000 hectares of these varieties in 2018. By 2022, they grew 1.2 million hectares. The result was dramatic. Ethiopia became self-sufficient in wheat within less than four years. Today, Ethiopia is now a net exporter of wheat.

A similar transformation is happening in Sudan. With the support of $75 million from the African Development Bank, working in partnership with the World Food Program, heat-tolerant wheat varieties are boosting wheat production and now account for over 22% of Sudan’s wheat supply – giving hope amid civil conflict.

Eastern Africa and parts of Southern Africa faced droughts in 2018, posing significant challenges to food security, as maize, the region’s major food staple, was severely affected. Again, technologies made the difference. Water-efficient and drought-tolerant maize varieties were provided by the African Development Bank through the TAAT program to over 5.6 million households. That helped 28 million people to survive the drought and food insecurity was averted.

In each of these cases, strong government policy support was critical.

Let me bring you home right here in Nigeria.

As Minister of Agriculture in Nigeria from 2011-2015, I supported Nigerian rice farmers to access high yielding rice technologies. At the time, farmers were given access to farm inputs through electronic coupons on their mobile phones, a revolutionary approach, the first to do globally. The farmers responded with massive food production. Within four years, Nigeria witnessed an enormous rice revolution and became self-sufficient in rice paddy production. At the time, we provided over 15 million farmers with agricultural technologies that allowed the country to produce over 20 million tons of additional food.

Subsequently, Nigeria became self-sufficient in paddy rice production. The impact of this renovation was also felt in the general cost of food. For example, the price of a 50-kilogram bag of rice at the time was N6,000 – N8,000 compared to N85,000 today! 

The African Development Bank significantly supports the Nigerian government on agriculture. Together with the Islamic Development Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, we provided $520 million to support the establishment of Special Agricultural Processing Zones, which will allow private agribusinesses to establish industries that process and add value to agricultural commodities.

The African Development Bank also provided $134 million to Nigeria for emergency food production to help drive down food price inflation by boosting the local production of wheat and cassava, under the National Agricultural Growth Scheme.

I was delighted that this support led to the cultivation of over 277,000 hectares of wheat in 2023/2024, an increase of 139% over the 115,000 hectares planted in the previous year.

The Nigerian government should take advantage of these investments, provide massive support to its farmers, show greater determination and commitment to achieving food self-sufficiency, and incentivize private-sector agribusinesses.

My excitement was, however short-lived. Nigeria’s recently announced (link is external) policy(link is external) to open its borders for massive food imports just to tackle short-term food price hikes, is depressing. It risks undermining all the hard work and private investments that have gone into Nigeria’s agriculture sector. Nigeria cannot rely on importing food to stabilize prices. Nigeria should be producing more food to stabilize food prices, while creating jobs and reducing foreign exchange spending, which will further help stabilize the Naira.

I feel today like Prophet Jeremiah, who said, “I am bent over in pain. Oh, the torture in my heart! My heart is pounding inside of me. I cannot keep quiet because

I have heard the trumpet.”

The food importation policy in Nigeria gives a distressing trumpet sound.

Nigeria cannot import its way out of food insecurity.

Nigeria must not be turned into a food import-dependent nation.

A nation that depends on others to feed itself, is independent only in name.

Nigeria must feed itself with pride!!

The lesson is clear: policy consistency is critical to achieving food security. The frequent policy reversals and politicization of food production have hurt Nigeria, and now risk permanently destroying its agriculture.

On his trip to Cote d’Ivoire early this year, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, praised the African Development Bank Group for its exceptional efforts in supporting countries to feed themselves. He said, and I quote, “Extraordinary work is being done to get to a place where Africa feeds itself and a place where Africa feeds the world. I’m convinced that can happen.”

To make this happen, the African Development Bank is intensifying its efforts. In West Africa, working with the Africa Rice Center, the African Development Bank has launched a $650 million Regional West Africa Rice Development Program. The program will support one million farmers in 15 countries to cultivate 750,000 hectares of land and produce 53 million tons of rice over five years.

Global geopolitical tensions and conflicts pose high risks of food insecurity for Africa. The Russia-Ukraine war triggered dramatic surges in the price of wheat and rice, stoking global inflation, with attendant potential risks to Africa, which relies on the two countries for significant shares of its imports of wheat and maize.

When I testified before the US Senate Foreign Affairs Committee on this imminent food security challenge facing Africa from the war, I was asked what Africa would do. My response was clear: “Africa should not go around with bowls begging for food. Africa must put seeds in its bowls and grow the food itself. There is no dignity in begging for food.”

To tackle the immediate effects of food price inflation resulting from the Russia-Ukraine and avoid potential civil unrests across Africa, as prices for wheat and maize soared, the African Development Bank launched a $1.5 billion emergency food production facility.

Through the facility, we have provided 20 million African smallholder farmers with climate-smart certified seeds and fertilizers to enable them to produce 38 million tons of food estimated at $12 billion over a two-year period. As of April 2024, we have approved loans and grants of $1.4 billion for emergency food production in 35 countries.

With $323 million of additional support from Japan, the US, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands, we also delivered a total of $1.8 billion in support of the emergency food production program.

Achieving food self-sufficiency requires moving beyond emergency food production toward structural medium- and long-term efforts to change food production and supply systems in Africa. That is why in January of 2023, I worked together with H.E. Macky Sall, the then President of Senegal and Chairperson of the African Union, to organize an unprecedented Feed Africa Summit, which brought together 34 African Heads of State and Government and led to significant government commitments to achieve food security by 2030.

The summit led to the proactive development of food and agricultural delivery compacts for each country. At the Summit, and in the months following, we succeeded in mobilizing $72 billion towards achieving this objective, with $10 billion of this commitment coming from the African Development Bank.     Africa must do more than produce food. We must add value to all agricultural commodities that we produce. It is shocking that while African countries (mainly Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon and Nigeria) produce over 70% of the global supply of cocoa beans, the continent receives a meager 2% of the $120 billion annual revenues from the processing of cocoa beans to chocolates. The same applies to cotton and cashew nuts, with the continent specializing in the export of cotton fiber and raw cashew nuts, which are processed outside the continent in Asia and other regions, making billions of dollars for the value-added processors and leaving Africa with low incomes, while being stuck at the bottom of the value chains.

The lesson is clear: exporting raw commodities is the door to poverty.

The export of value-added commodities is the highway to wealth.

To support Africa’s ambitions to move up the global agricultural value chains, the African Development Bank is supporting the development of Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zones. These zones, supported by critical infrastructure, enabling environments, and fiscal incentives, allow private-sector agribusinesses to establish industries to buy, process, and add value to agricultural commodities. The African Development Bank and partners have already mobilized over $4.5 billion towards the establishment of 28 of these zones in 11 countries.

The success of these efforts to transform agriculture will require the availability of continuous electricity supply. This is still a challenge in many countries, with about 600 million people in Africa being without access to electricity. I am glad to report that over the last seven years, the African  Development Bank has connected over 20 million people to electricity.

We are also implementing a visionary and innovative $20 billion Desert to Power program to develop 10,000 megawatts of solar power across 11 countries in the Sahel zone of Africa. This will provide electricity for 250 million people.

The President of the World Bank, Ajay Banga and I have also launched a joint effort between our institutions to connect 300 million people in Africa (link is external) to electricity by 2030.(link is external)

It is important to emphasize that to fully unleash the power of the agricultural sector to achieve food security, the youth must be encouraged and supported to see the tremendous opportunities the industry provides and to rethink and re-envision agriculture as a wealth-creating business that will produce the next generation of African millionaires. As minister of agriculture in Nigeria from 20112015, I led a major effort to attract a new generation of young agropreneurs and to make agriculture exciting for the youth. We succeeded.

For example, Dr. Tope Aroge, a young medical doctor, who owns AROG Bio Allied Agro Services Company, is now one of the largest processors of cassava in Nigeria.

Ms. Affiong Williams, a 38-year-old, owns Reel Fruits which is now the largest dry fruit processing and packaging company in Nigeria. 

The African Development Bank is implementing a $490 million project to support youth in agriculture through a program called Enable Youth in Agriculture. So far, the program has trained over 41,000 youth Agri-entrepreneurs, and they have created over 63,000 jobs.

However, Africa’s youth face huge challenges in accessing financing to start and grow their businesses. As a result, many of them are unemployed, underemployed and discouraged. The result is the growing trend of migration to Europe and other places, with sometimes perilous journeys on the high seas.

To turn this around, the African Development Bank is establishing Youth Entrepreneurship Investment Banks, which are new financial institutions exclusively devoted to financing and supporting the business ventures of the youth.

Our Board of Directors has approved the first set of Youth Entrepreneurship Investment Banks for Liberia ($16 million) and Ethiopia ($32 million), with several more in the pipeline, including Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Togo, Tunisia, Egypt, Zambia, Botswana and South Africa.

We must do a lot more for women.

Women drive economies across Africa but are generally unable to access finance. The growth and development of Africa will, therefore be accelerated with greater access of women to financing. That is why the African Development Bank is implementing the Affirmative Finance Action for Women (AFAWA) to mobilize $5 billion for women-owned businesses. The total cumulative approvals for women financing at the Bank reached $1.7 billion at the end of last year. The AFAWA program, being run through the Africa Guarantee Fund, currently works with 169 financial institutions in 43 African countries. The financial institutions have disbursed $520 million for 17,500 women-led and-owned businesses.

Let me share with you the stories of Camillus, Francoise, and Pauline, three hard-working women who are being supported by AFAWA.

Camillus Namata from Uganda, who runs Jude Colors Solutions -a marketing and branding company -- received a $350,000 AFAWA loan through the Centenary Bank in Uganda. The turnover of her business rose from $13,500 in 2011 to $4.86 million in 2023.

Francoise Kaliende, from the Republic of Congo, worked for two decades as a housekeeper in Belgium before moving back home to start her own housekeeping business in 2006. She has grown her business to employ 1,500 employees today. Francoise received an AFAWA loan of $900,000 to build a hospital. Her goal is to ensure all her employees become homeowners.

Pauline Otila of Kenya runs the Apiculture Venture for beekeeping. She received an AFAWA loan of $20,000 which she is using to expand her operations, which now has 1,500 employees.

There is no doubt that Camila, Francoise and Pauline, just like several women entrepreneurs, have shown the power of women-owned businesses, in changing communities, creating jobs and supporting the livelihoods of individuals and families.

No bird can fly with one wing. We must strongly support women. When women earn incomes, they spend most of it on their children and families, including husbands.

When women win, families win. When women win, communities win. When women win, nations win. When women win, Africa wins.  When women win, churches win.

Let me now turn to the issue of financial sustainability. In my view, financial sustainability must not be abstract. The growth of economies must directly translate into positive impacts on people's lives. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth is important, but nobody eats GDP. And nobody takes GDP per capita to the market to buy goods. This pragmatism must drive our discourse. If the youth have no jobs, the cost of food, transport and housing are unbearable, and inflation eats away people's salaries, turning pensioners into miserable ends, that is not financial sustainability.

To be financially sustainable as a nation, its citizens must first be financially sustainable. In the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, African economies ran into severe financial challenges, economic lockdowns, restricted trade and expanded public spending, widening the fiscal deficits for countries.

While developed economies spent $19 trillion on fiscal stimulus programs to support their citizens, African countries spent only $83 billion. This has led to a slower pace of economic recovery in Africa and a widening economic divergence. Unfortunately, the level of public debt in many countries is very high. Africa will this year pay $74 billion to service external debt, a surge from $17 billion in 2010. Some countries are spending more on debt service than on food security, health and education. This has also been made worse by devastating climate change impacts across many parts of Africa.

Africa, therefore, needs to have increased financial support, especially through more concessional financing from multilateral development banks such as the African Development Bank.

To expand Africa’s access to more concessional financing, the African Development Fund mobilized $8.9 billion for countries, which is basically provided as grants to countries.

We are working extremely hard to raise more financing for Africa.  In 2019, I led efforts to persuade our 81 shareholder countries to raise the capital base of the African Development Bank. We succeeded. The shareholders increased the capital of the Bank from $93 billion to $208 billion, the largest capital increase since the establishment of the Bank in 1964. And just last month, at the Annual Meetings of the Bank, our shareholders further increased the capital of the African Development Bank by another $117 billion. That takes the capitalization of the African Development Bank to $318 billion. This represents a 241% increase in the capital of the African Development Bank since I was elected President in 2015.

You can be proud of the African Development Bank. Two years ago, the African Development Bank was ranked as the best multilateral financial institution in the world. Last year, the African Development Bank was ranked as the most transparent financial institution in the world for our financing to countries.

The African Development Bank will continue to work relentlessly for Africa to feed itself, stabilize its economies, create jobs, and accelerate the continent’s development.

Yet, with all our resources, they pale in comparison to the resources at the disposal of countries. Countries need to mobilize more domestic resources to spur their development and not just depend on external financing. In doing so, governments should be mindful of their social contracts with citizens. There must be transparency and accountability for national resources. National resources and assets belong to the people and not to individuals, so they must be used well to improve the quality of life for citizens.

Government taxes are needed, but they must be done in ways that do not overtax the population, especially low-income households, and the majority of the population that are in the informal sector, simply doing all they can to eke out a living. People-centric public policies are needed to assure food security for all, health for all, education for all, and expanded wealth from pro-private sector policies that will drive industrial growth, good jobs and better lives for people.

These are all possible when governments are accountable to the people.

There is still much to be done. The Apostle said, “This is the one thing I do: forgetting what is behind me, and reaching out for what is before me.”

As we look to what is before us, we must work together in stronger partnerships. As leaders of the church, you have a duty and responsibility to inspire hope for people. But we must go beyond hope; we must deliver immediate results in the lives of people. The Bible says, “hope delayed makes the heart go weary.”

I would therefore like to close by suggesting five areas where the Church can play a significant role as part of a global coalition of partners, together with civil society, governments and the private sector, to deliver on food security and financial sustainability.

First, church leaders should use their moral authority to be at the forefront of advocacy for policies to end hunger and malnutrition. This should be complemented by the establishment of food banks and other social protection programs for the poor and needy. This is both a biblical injunction and an economic imperative. Food security must become a constitutionally enshrined human right, and a moral obligation of all governments.

Second, the church should consider establishing financial ventures to support commercial farms, boosting food production and supporting livelihoods, especially in rural areas. This fits with the biblical injunction that “Faith without works is dead.”

Third, the church should take a leadership role in advocating issues of climate change, given its severe impacts on people, lives and the environment.

Fourth, the church should encourage the youth to go into agriculture as a business by establishing Youth Agri-preneurs initiatives.

Fifth, the church should use its voice and congregants to speak up for greater financial accountability, public probity, financial management and people-focused public policies that will improve the lives and livelihoods of citizens.

Millions of people, the poor, and the needy, look to God each day. We must become the vessels for God to use to answer prayers; instruments created by God unto good works. The good works of accelerating the development of Africa. The good works of ensuring no stomach goes hungry; no mother watches her child with a rumbling stomach. The good works of supporting the poor, the vulnerable and the needy. The good works of creating jobs for joy and sparkles in the eyes of our youth. The good works of giving hope to the old, to make their end better than their beginning. The good works of bringing a new lease of life and prosperity to our rural areas. The good works of supporting all people, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or social status; all seeking better lives for themselves and their families.

We must strengthen weak hands and feeble knees; and assure financial security for all. It is a moral obligation and responsibility. God is watching. And we must not disappoint. Like the good Samaritan, let us look at the needs of all people. Then let us act with solutions.

By Dr. Akinwumi A. Adesina

President and Chairman of the Boards of Directors African Development Bank Group.