For more than a decade, Africa has been told that agricultural transformation is coming.
Billions of dollars have flowed through development banks, donor programmes, government initiatives, concessional finance facilities, food-security strategies and agricultural investment programmes, yet the numbers that ultimately matter tell a deeply uncomfortable story. Africa is producing more food than it did ten years ago, but not enough more food per person, productivity remains stubbornly low, and the number of people going hungry has increased dramatically.
Between 2015 and 2024, approximately US$62 billion in official external agricultural finance was actually disbursed to Africa, based on OECD and United Nations data covering official development assistance and other official agricultural flows. Annual disbursements increased from around US$4.5 billion in 2015 to US$8.7 billion in 2024, almost doubling in real terms. This was not money merely pledged on conference stages or announced in press releases. This was reported money flowing into agriculture, rural development and related sectors.
The obvious question should therefore be brutally simple: what changed? If billions are being deployed in the name of food security, agricultural productivity, rural prosperity and farmer resilience, we should be able to see the results in production, productivity, farmer economics and ultimately hunger. Development finance cannot be measured only by how much money is committed, how many programmes are launched or how many beneficiaries appear in project reports. It has to be measured by whether the system itself becomes stronger.
The production numbers initially look encouraging. According to FAO data, the real value of African agricultural output increased from approximately US$313 billion in 2015 to US$388 billion in 2024, growth of around 24 per cent. That sounds substantial until it is compared with Africa's population, which grew by almost exactly the same amount over the period. In practical terms, agricultural output per African barely moved.
That is the uncomfortable reality hidden inside the headline growth numbers. Africa produced more agricultural output, but it also had hundreds of millions more mouths to feed, meaning that the continent gained almost no meaningful agricultural-output dividend per person. Growth happened, but transformation did not.
The cereal numbers are even harder to ignore. African cereal production increased from approximately 188 million tonnes in 2015 to 223 million tonnes in 2024, an increase of about 18.5 per cent. Population grew faster, which means cereal production per person actually declined from roughly 154 kilograms per person to about 147 kilograms over the same period.
Even more revealing is how that additional cereal production was achieved. Land used for cereal cultivation expanded by more than 15 per cent, while cereal yields increased by only around 3 per cent. In other words, much of the increase came from cultivating more land rather than dramatically improving what each hectare produced.
That should concern anyone serious about agricultural transformation. Expanding acreage is not the same as increasing productivity, particularly on a continent facing climate stress, land degradation, water scarcity and rapidly rising population pressure. Africa cannot simply cultivate its way out of the productivity gap.
The African Development Bank's own reporting reinforces the point. Its recent development effectiveness data shows cereal yields moving from roughly 1.69 tonnes per hectare in 2020 to around 1.68 tonnes per hectare in 2024, effectively no progress. Africa's yields remain far below the global average, despite years of investment in seed systems, irrigation, mechanisation, extension, digital agriculture, infrastructure and agricultural finance.
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But perhaps the most devastating numbers are not production numbers at all. They are the hunger numbers.
In 2015, approximately 194 million Africans were undernourished. By 2024, that figure had risen to more than 300 million. The prevalence of undernourishment increased from roughly 16 per cent of the population to about 20 per cent, while the number of people experiencing moderate or severe food insecurity rose from approximately 564 million in 2015 to more than 850 million by 2023.
Think about what that means. During a decade in which agricultural development finance increased substantially, agricultural output increased, new technologies were launched, programmes multiplied and institutions repeatedly promised transformation, the number of hungry Africans increased by well over 100 million.
This does not prove that development finance caused hunger, and pretending that it does would be intellectually dishonest. The decade included COVID-19, climate shocks, conflict, currency depreciation, fertiliser-price spikes, disrupted supply chains, food-price inflation and the economic consequences of the war in Ukraine. Hunger is also fundamentally about access and affordability, not merely how much food is produced.
But those factors do not make the question disappear. They make the question more urgent.
Development finance exists precisely because markets and systems are vulnerable to shocks. Resilience, productivity, market access, climate adaptation and food security are not side objectives of agricultural development finance. They are the reason many of these programmes exist in the first place.
The defence that “external shocks happened” therefore cannot be the end of the discussion. A resilient agricultural system should become better able to absorb shocks as investment accumulates. If billions are spent building resilience but vulnerability continues to rise, we have to ask whether we are financing projects or building systems.
There is evidence that many individual projects have worked. Farmers have increased yields, irrigation schemes have improved production, technologies have raised efficiency, value chains have been strengthened and individual communities have benefited enormously. Independent evaluations of World Bank and African Development Bank agricultural programmes confirm that many interventions achieve positive project-level outcomes.
The real failure appears somewhere between the successful pilot and the continent-wide result.
The African Development Bank's own independent evaluations repeatedly identify the same weaknesses: fragmented programmes, weak extension systems, insufficient infrastructure, poor access to finance, underdeveloped processing, weak input supply chains, institutional constraints, limited monitoring and difficulty scaling successful interventions. Projects can perform well while the wider agricultural system remains disconnected.
That distinction may be the most important lesson of the last decade. Africa does not necessarily have a project failure problem. It has a conversion problem.
Money enters one side of the system, but the expected transformation does not consistently emerge from the other. Capital does not reliably convert into higher productivity, higher farmer incomes, stronger market participation, lower post-harvest losses, affordable food and reduced hunger at the scale required.
One farmer may receive training but still have no affordable finance. Another may obtain finance but have no guaranteed market. A cooperative may have buyers but lack traceability, cold storage or logistics. A development programme may distribute inputs without connecting production to contracted demand. A technology platform may digitise farmers without solving payment, compliance or market access. A bank may finance agriculture without having enough trusted production data to understand risk.
Each intervention can succeed individually while the farmer remains trapped inside a fragmented system.
That is why simply calling for “more investment” risks repeating the same mistake. Africa certainly requires much more agricultural capital, and the estimated financing requirement for genuine agricultural transformation runs into hundreds of billions of dollars. African governments themselves continue to spend far below the long-standing CAADP ambition of allocating 10 per cent of public expenditure to agriculture.
But capital without coordination can multiply activity without multiplying outcomes. The next US$60 billion cannot be deployed using exactly the same architecture as the last US$60 billion and then expect fundamentally different results.
We need to become far more demanding about what agricultural investment actually produces. Every major programme should be able to answer a small number of questions that are surprisingly difficult to answer today: Did farmer productivity increase? Did the farmer earn more money? Did the farmer gain reliable market access? Did food become more available and affordable? Did private capital become more willing to participate? Did the intervention survive after donor funding ended? Did it scale beyond the original project boundary?
If the answer cannot be demonstrated, then the number of farmers “reached” or dollars “committed” is not enough.
Africa's agricultural challenge is increasingly not a shortage of initiatives. It is a shortage of infrastructure connecting those initiatives into a functioning economic system. Farmers, cooperatives, governments, buyers, financial institutions, input suppliers, logistics providers, insurers, extension officers and technology providers often operate within the same agricultural economy but across completely different systems, databases, contracts and incentives.
That fragmentation carries a cost. It creates duplicated onboarding, duplicated farmer records, duplicated assessments, fragmented funding, disconnected markets and development programmes that struggle to see what happened to the farmer after the intervention ended.
Agriculture needs rails.
It needs shared infrastructure through which farmer identity, production data, finance, inputs, compliance, logistics, insurance, extension services, market demand and payment can operate together. Not another platform seeking to replace every existing solution, but infrastructure capable of allowing existing institutions and technologies to connect around the farmer.
The farmer should not have to navigate the development ecosystem. The ecosystem should organise itself around the farmer.
This is where the next decade must be fundamentally different from the last. Success cannot be another announcement that billions have been mobilised, another pilot involving thousands of farmers or another technology claiming to revolutionise agriculture. Success must ultimately appear in the numbers that matter: higher productivity, higher farmer income, stronger agricultural output per person, lower food insecurity and fewer hungry Africans.
The last decade has given us enough evidence to ask a much harder question of every institution financing African agriculture.
Not “How much did you spend?”
But “What changed because you spent it?”
Until that becomes the central measure of agricultural development finance, Africa risks celebrating the mobilisation of money while millions more people join the queue for food.
