The African Development Bank has announced investments of $24bn in the coming decade to drive Africa’s agricultural transformation.

“This is a 400% increase in financing to the agricultural sector by the Bank from its current levels of $600m per year,” Chiji Ojukwu, Director of the Bank’s Agriculture and Agro-industries Department, said.

The Bank’s contribution will support the private sector to unlock the potential of African agriculture.

In his keynote address delivered on September 8, 2016 during a plenary session on the “Role of Policy in Enabling Public-Private Partnerships to Achieve African Agricultural Transformation”, AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina said: “Africa must seize this moment and prioritize investments in agriculture. It is time to support African farmers; African farmers cannot fail.”

The AfDB’s $24bn commitment is part of the $30bn pledged by major development institutions, the private sector and African leaders at the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) in Nairobi, Kenya.

The funds will support investments to increase production and income for smallholder farmers and local African agriculture businesses over the next decade. 

Kenya’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta, has pledged $200m to support 150,000 young farmers and agricultural entrepreneurs to access markets, finance and insurance over the next five years.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for its part, has pledged $5bn, a portion of which will go towards crop and livestock research, strengthening data, and improving systems to deliver innovation and information; and to provide better tools to farmers.

The next six years will see Africa’s agriculture benefit from $3bn pledged by the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The Rockefeller Foundation has committed to contributing $180m towards investments in human resilience to catalyse agricultural transformation, while the Kenya Commerical Bank, East Africa’s largest commercial Bank will invest $350m in loans for smallholder farmers, 50,000 of them women and another 50,000 youth.

In addition, a fertilizer firm, OCP Africa, has committed to investing $150m  over the next five years to support local fertilizer distribution, storage and blending, while the World Food Programme has promised to purchase at least $120m each year in agricultural products from smallholder farmers through a partnership called the Patient Procurement Platform.