Farmers still waiting: Africa's agricultural promise remains unfulfilled after 20 years

KIGALI’S RECKONING: TWENTY YEARS AFTER ANNAN’S PROMISE, AFRICA’S FOOD REVOLUTION FALLS SHORT

A Ghanaian diplomat stood before African leaders in Addis Ababa two decades ago and issued a challenge that would reshape the continent’s agricultural future. Kofi Annan’s words were direct: “Let us generate a uniquely African green revolution, a revolution that is long overdue, a revolution that will help the continent in its quest for dignity and peace.” This week, as the Africa Food Systems Forum convenes in Kigali, Rwanda, from August 31 to September 4, that promise is being weighed against what actually happened.

That single address produced three lasting institutions. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) emerged in 2006 as the operational body tasked with driving change. A series of conferences beginning in Oslo from 2006 to 2008, which later became the African Green Revolution Forum and evolved into the current Africa Food Systems Forum, created a space where scientists, policymakers, farmers and financiers could work together rather than in isolation. The Africa Food Prize followed, embodying Annan’s belief that recognition and honest reflection could inspire better performance across the continent.

Now, as these three instruments converge in Kigali, they bring with them an uncomfortable verdict.

A newly published AGRA@20 Impact, Learning and Foresight Report offers what its authors describe as an unflinching assessment, stripped of diplomatic language. The central finding is stark: Africa has built institutions and generated real productivity gains, but it has not constructed the delivery systems necessary to convert those gains into reliable incomes, jobs and resilience for the farmers who depend on them most.

The productivity improvements where AGRA invested are genuine and substantial. Seed systems improved, farmer services expanded, policy reform advanced and institutional partnerships strengthened. Yet income gains for the farmers who matter most remain partial and uneven. Markets did not follow seeds into the ground as anticipated. Inclusive finance, the capital that transforms a good harvest into a sustainable livelihood, never arrived at the scale or speed the moment required. Production gains without market access, finance, accountable institutions and last-mile delivery do not automatically become prosperity. This is the report’s central lesson.

Four questions now demand answers. Where did support leave behind institutions and capabilities that survived beyond the funding, and where did progress simply evaporate when money stopped? What capabilities remain lacking to convert production into income, resilience and dignified work? Which outcomes can governments honestly claim credit for, and where have they hidden behind the word “catalytic” to avoid accountability? And have they done enough, genuinely enough, for the women and young people who form the backbone of the agricultural sector but remain at its margins?

These questions emerge not from abstract analysis but from lived experience inside government systems. The complexity of agricultural transformation becomes visible only when one sits in the rooms where policy ambition meets the hard walls of administration. Procurement processes stretch across months or years. Implementation units designed to satisfy lender requirements often ignore farmer realities. Disbursement delays miss planting seasons. Consultants understand reporting templates better than district agricultural officers understand the projects themselves. Large World Bank or African Development Bank loans enter the national debt stock long before they reach a farmer’s field.

By the time a headline announces a half-billion-dollar agricultural transformation project, the taxpayer has already inherited the obligation. The actual delivery remains trapped in approvals, no-objections, procurement disputes and implementation bottlenecks. Local media, citizens and parliaments must ask harder questions. When government borrows in the name of agriculture, who is responsible for delivery? When a loan is approved, where is the execution plan that protects both the farmer and the taxpayer? When procurement delays push inputs beyond the season, who accounts for the lost harvest? When project money is absorbed by vehicles, workshops, consultancies and coordination meetings, what actually reaches the village?

Three shifts must now occur. Governments must stop outsourcing the idea of delivery while retaining only the ceremony of ownership. The most effective reforms emerge not from outsiders, however brilliant their consultants, but from public servants who understand the political economy of their own country. A ministry that cannot explain its own delivery numbers without a consultant’s slide deck has not been strengthened. It has been made dependent.

Meanwhile, Africa needs instruments of radical honesty: scorecards, not communiqués. Every country that signed the Kampala CAADP Declaration this year committed to specific, measurable targets on budget allocation, productivity and governance. A continental scorecard should track, country by country, whether the 10 percent budget commitment first made at Maputo in 2003 is actually being met, whether extension services reach the last mile, and whether procurement for agricultural inputs is transparent enough to survive a journalist’s inquiry. A scorecard is not punishment. It is a mirror. Africa’s farmers deserve a mirror as unflinching as the one AGRA has held up to itself.

Third, accountability must have teeth and corruption must have consequences. Every diverted bag of subsidised fertiliser represents a farmer’s child who does not eat, a harvest that does not happen, a young person who concludes, correctly, that agriculture is a sector for the connected rather than the industrious. If the youth this Forum claims to champion are to see a future in farming, they must first see a system that rewards effort over proximity to power.

The evidence from Kigali this week is clear: Africa has delivered partially, unevenly, and not nearly enough. The next twenty years will be decided not by the ambition of declarations but by the discipline of delivery. Governments must publish scorecards, fund delivery units, protect procurement from capture and hold themselves publicly accountable for results. That responsibility does not belong to donors. It belongs to Africa. The open question is whether the political will to act on that truth will outlast the week in Kigali.