The ninth edition of Agriculture Summit Africa convened in Abuja on 15 and 16 September under the theme “Building the Next Superpower: Africa’s Food Power Play,” assembling development finance institutions, agri-tech companies and private banks around a familiar but unresolved problem. Africa holds a large share of the world’s uncultivated arable land, yet many of its countries remain structurally dependent on imported food.
Sterling Bank, a Nigerian lender, convened the summit alongside the International Finance Corporation, sustainable trade organisation IDH and a coalition that included Mastercard, British American Tobacco Nigeria and agri-tech firm FarmKart. The mix of financial, consumer and technology companies reflected an argument, made repeatedly at the summit, that Africa food security investment requires more than agricultural policy alone to close the continent’s import gap.
Dele Faseemo, a Sterling Bank group executive, framed the bank’s involvement in balance-sheet terms rather than corporate social responsibility. “When Sterling talks about agriculture, we are speaking as a bank that puts its balance sheet where its convictions are,” he told delegates, signalling a shift from grant-funded pilot projects toward commercial lending as the sector’s dominant financing model going forward.
Food as geopolitics, and farming
Sterling Bank’s Olushola Obikanye argued for reframing agriculture’s importance beyond food supply alone. “Food is jobs. Food is trade. Food is foreign exchange, industrial policy, climate resilience, and increasingly, geopolitical power,” she said, a framing that positions agricultural investment as a matter of national strategy rather than sector-specific development spending confined to farm ministries.
That framing found an echo from the International Finance Corporation’s Christian Mulamula, who described the summit’s purpose as bringing together “policymakers, investors, financial institutions, and development partners to accelerate investment.” The IFC has increasingly positioned itself as a co-investor rather than a grant-maker in African agriculture, a shift that puts pressure on projects to demonstrate commercial viability rather than social impact alone before funding is released.
Whether that shift toward commercial financing reaches smallholder farmers, who still produce most of the continent’s food, is a separate question from whether it reaches large-scale agribusiness. Development finance institutions have historically found it easier to underwrite large processing and logistics companies than to lend directly to farmers working a few hectares, a gap that summit discussions did not appear to resolve with specific commitments during the two-day gathering.
Consumer-facing companies at the table add a further wrinkle to that gap. Mastercard’s involvement points toward digital payments infrastructure as a precondition for rural lending, since financial institutions typically need transaction records before they will extend credit to smallholder farmers who have historically operated in cash. British American Tobacco Nigeria’s presence, meanwhile, reflects large consumer companies’ growing interest in agricultural supply chains they depend on, even outside their core product lines.
The Abuja gathering arrives against a backdrop of worsening food insecurity data elsewhere on the continent and beyond, with a separate United Nations update this month warning that famine risk is climbing in Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan even as humanitarian food funding falls. Continent-wide investment coalitions of the kind convened this week are, in part, a response to the recognition that aid budgets alone cannot close Africa’s food import gap on their own.
No specific funding figures or project commitments emerged from the coverage of the summit’s proceedings. What did emerge was a clearer sense of who now considers African food security bankable: governments and aid agencies, certainly, but also consumer banks, payment companies and agri-tech start-ups betting that the continent’s food gap is a commercial opportunity as much as a development challenge.
