CAADP’s Harsh Lesson: Money On The Table, No Projects To Match
Under the blue lights of the Kigali Convention Centre, with translation headsets humming and cameras sweeping the hall, Africa’s agriculture establishment gathered to celebrate twenty years of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP).
Yet the subtext in the room was less anniversary, more audit.
Africa now has a fresh CAADP compact, the Kampala Declaration. It has a thick stack of strategies, an alphabet of institutions, and a queue of willing financiers – from development banks to climate funds. What most countries still do not have is the one thing every financier demands before releasing a single dollar: a folder of costed, appraised, investment-ready programmes.
In Kigali this week, that gap was no longer possible to hide.
Who Is Ready To Finance Africa’s Agriculture?
More than 5,000 delegates from over 50 countries are in Rwanda for the 20th Africa Food Systems Forum, held under the theme: “Investing in Africa’s Agri-Food Systems: Nourishing Nations, Growing Jobs, Building Resilience.”
The slogan is not decorative. It is a diagnosis.
Institutions such as AGRA, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the African Development Bank, IFAD, the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD), Afreximbank, and a growing list of climate and blended-finance vehicles have all signalled they are ready to put real money behind CAADP’s new phase.
But they are asking for something very specific in return: solid, bankable projects.
Financiers do not disburse against declarations. They disburse against projects – with feasibility studies, cost tables, procurement plans and risk analysis attached.
Across much of the continent, that project pipeline is thin or non-existent.
What Changed Under The Kampala CAADP Declaration?
The Kampala CAADP Declaration and its Strategy and Action Plan for 2026–2035 came into force on 1 January, replacing the Malabo framework that guided African agriculture from 2014 to 2025.
The new compact is explicit about what it wants to achieve by 2035. Member states have signed up to targets that include:
- Raising agrifood output by 45 percent.
- Halving post-harvest losses.
- Tripling intra-African trade in agrifood products.
- Ensuring at least 35 percent of agrifood GDP comes from locally processed food.
- Mobilising US$100 billion in public and private investment for agrifood systems.
- Reaching zero hunger across all member states.
On paper, it is a bold, detailed agenda.
What is striking is that the Strategy itself quietly admits a core weakness. One of its action points calls directly for strengthening the facilities that develop flagship and bankable agrifood projects at both national and regional level. In plain language: Africa does not yet have enough capacity to write investable programmes.
The history bears this out. Over CAADP’s first twenty years, 45 countries signed national compacts and 31 produced National Agricultural Investment Plans. Only 28 went on to complete the cycle and actually mobilise resources against those plans.
By the time of the fourth CAADP Biennial Review, no African Union member state was on track to meet the Malabo commitments by 2025. Thirty countries were officially off track; six did not submit reports at all.
Kampala’s remedy is clear: each country must embed the new priorities in National and Regional Agrifood Systems Investment Plans – NASIPs and RASIPs – by 2028.
The reality is much messier.
At a Southern African “domestication” workshop convened by AUDA-NEPAD in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, earlier this year, officials compared notes. Some, like Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar, are drafting new NASIPs and can weave the Kampala priorities in from the start. Others are stuck with older plans written for Malabo or even earlier frameworks, and must bend them to fit a new agenda.
A peer-learning session in Accra reached a similar verdict: unless member states take full ownership and run Kampala through cabinet and treasury processes – not just agriculture ministries – the continent risks repeating Malabo’s pattern of good intentions and missed targets.
What Are Africa’s Agriculture Leaders Saying?
The warning signs are not new. They have simply been ignored.
AUDA-NEPAD chief executive Nardos Bekele-Thomas has made project preparation a drumbeat issue for years. At an African Union water investment summit in Cape Town, she urged governments to convert ideas into bankable projects that attract both public and private lenders, arguing that Africa’s core problem is execution, not imagination.
Speaking to African ambassadors, she went further, asking partners to fund the pre-feasibility work needed to build “a pipeline of bankable projects”, and reminding capitals that, “You cannot build institutions if you cannot fund it.”
AGRA president Alice Ruhweza has framed the same reality through budgets. “We cannot grow what we do not fund,” she said, highlighting that Africa spends tens of billions of dollars every year importing food while sitting on a vast share of the world’s uncultivated arable land.
In the run-up to Kigali, she demanded that the Forum move beyond talk. “We need clear delivery plans, defined implementation pathways,” she said, promising that AGRA would track the commitments made there.
Rwanda’s Minister of Agriculture, Telesphore Ndabamenye, put it even more bluntly from the main stage this week. Africa, he argued, is not short of ideas, innovation or opportunity. What is missing is the machinery that moves from model to implementation: coherent policy, strong institutions, coordination and accountability.
Independent analysts, writing ahead of the Forum, dispensed with diplomacy altogether, listing among Africa’s structural failures the “climate-finance proposals that never become investment-ready projects.” Another partner commentary insisted Kampala must become a delivery platform that “turns national plans into bankable investments” instead of another well-written continental commitment.
How Does An Empty Project Pipeline Show Up On The Plate?
The price of paperwork that never gets written is counted in meals, not memos.
AGRA’s twenty-year assessment, released as the Forum opened, estimates Africa’s agrifood financing gap at around US$180 billion per year. About US$65 billion of that is owed to small and medium agribusinesses – the millers, cold-store operators, aggregators, seed companies and processors that turn harvests into safe, storable, marketable food.
At the same time, hundreds of millions of Africans are living with hunger or moderate to severe food insecurity.
Roughly 90 percent of farming in sub-Saharan Africa still depends on rainfall. Only a tiny share of arable land is under irrigation. Every rainy season that an irrigation scheme, a cold chain, a fertiliser blending plant or a seed system remains in a concept note rather than a signed financing agreement is a season when yields stay flat and diets do not improve.
This is why the “bankability gap” is a nutrition crisis, not just a bureaucratic one. Kampala’s food and nutrition security pillar – reducing stunting, widening access to diverse, healthy diets, and building strategic grain reserves – is meant to be funded through the same investment plans that many countries have not yet drafted.
No plan, no disbursement. No disbursement, no diet.
AGRA’s assessment is clear that governments cannot carry this load alone. On current trends, the 2035 Kampala targets will not be met without a much broader alliance of public and private players in government, business, finance and research. What is needed, it argues, is a shift away from isolated pilot projects toward integrated systems – value chains where production, processing, logistics, finance and markets are planned together.
Who Is Doing The Hard Work On Project Preparation?
In the background of the Kigali headlines, several organisations have been slowly building the missing pipes between strategy and finance.
IGAD has activated its Committee of Ambassadors, its Parliamentary Forum on Agrifood Systems and technical experts from member states to build real ownership of the Kampala Declaration. Budget allocation – and the long-standing pledge to devote at least 10 percent of public spending to agriculture – sits at the centre of that conversation.
The African Union Commission and AUDA-NEPAD have rolled out NAIP and RAIP realignment workshops, and have opened a formal channel through which governments can request support to domesticate Kampala in their national plans.
FAO anchors much of the technical assistance and data on hunger and nutrition, while the African Development Bank remains the continent’s biggest funder of hard agriculture infrastructure – dams, roads, storage and energy for value chains.
On the knowledge side, organisations such as AKADEMIYA2063 provide the economic and policy analysis backing the Kampala framework; AU-IBAR focuses that lens on the livestock economy. CGIAR centres including IFPRI, ILRI and IRRI feed in research on crops, livestock, water and soils. Afreximbank has teamed up with AUDA-NEPAD on joint project-preparation initiatives.
Regional economic communities – EAC, SADC, ECOWAS and others – are meant to be the spaces where cross-border investment plans actually get stitched together. Yet gaps remain. In July, East African parliamentarians, researchers and farmer organisations examined whether the region’s 2026/27 budgets could carry Kampala’s ambitions. Their answer was stark: not yet.
How Does This Land In Zimbabwe?
For Zimbabwe, CAADP is not an abstract African process parked in Addis Ababa. It is supposed to be woven directly into the National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1) and Vision 2030 targets for agriculture-led growth, rural development and food security.
The country has already seen what happens when plans outpace projects. Ambitious targets for irrigated hectares, mechanisation and agro-processing have often run ahead of the bankable deals needed to make them real at district level.
The AUDA-NEPAD domestication workshop in Victoria Falls, which brought together officials from across Southern Africa, underlined that countries like Zimbabwe must now rework their national agriculture and food systems investment plans so that Kampala’s priorities – climate-smart production, nutrition, intra-African trade, youth and women’s empowerment – are costed and sequenced.
That means more than aligning language. It means a growing stack of project documents in Harare and the provinces: irrigation rehabilitation plans with engineering designs and economic rates of return; proposals for horticulture export corridors linking Macheke or Mazowe to regional markets; blended-finance structures for livestock value chains in Matabeleland that can go in front of AfDB or GCF boards.
Farmers in areas like Chiredzi, Nkayi or Gokwe will feel the difference when those projects move from paper to trenches, cables and cold rooms. Until then, the continental talk of US$100 billion in agrifood investment will stay distant from the borehole that keeps a nutrition garden alive in a dry January.
For Zimbabwean agripreneurs – especially women and youth-led enterprises – the Kampala push could unlock new windows with regional banks and impact investors, but only if their ideas are shaped into the kind of appraised, cash-flowed business cases financiers recognise. That is where partnerships with local universities, technical agencies and regional project-preparation facilities will matter.
What Is Kigali Actually Doing Differently?
This year’s Africa Food Systems Forum, officially opened on 2 September by Rwanda’s Prime Minister Justin Nsengiyumva, has tried to answer that question directly.
Nsengiyumva urged delegates to stop seeing agriculture as “grass and soil” and start seeing it as a modern sector built on technology, logistics and services, warning that a productive farm is almost worthless without roads, energy, irrigation, storage, finance, processing and reliable markets wrapped around it.
The programme has revolved around five pillars:
- Investment and finance – how to connect African and global capital to real agricultural opportunities.
- Food security and nutrition – translating finance into better diets and lower stunting.
- Climate resilience – ensuring projects withstand droughts, floods and shifting seasons.
- Youth and digital innovation – bringing in new talent and tools.
- Trade, markets and value chains – making the African Continental Free Trade Area real for farmers and agribusinesses.
In the Investment Room, sessions have unpacked how financial centres can identify and support bankable agriculture deals. Others, anchored in the Kampala Strategy, have focused on directing investment to women and young people in rural economies.
The Deal Room – a familiar feature from previous editions – has again matched enterprises with investors. In Dakar last year, it surfaced country investment programmes worth more than US$6 billion. A Council of the Wise, made up of former heads of state and government, has sat alongside senior leaders from the AU, FAO, IFAD, CGIAR and a cluster of development finance institutions.
The Forum will close with a communiqué linked explicitly to the Kampala Declaration – a public test of whether Africa’s premier agriculture convening is ready to talk less about principles and more about pipelines.
Amath Pathe Sene, the Forum’s managing director, has argued that the twentieth anniversary should be read as a hinge, not a birthday. The first twenty years proved Africa can convene. The next twenty, he says, must prove it can deliver. He has already cast 2026 as a moment when delegates will be expected to return to Kigali with evidence that this year’s decisions have been translated into documents, deals and construction sites.
From Declarations To Disbursements
The stakes could not be more concrete. Africa’s food security no longer hangs mainly on political will or donor generosity. The offers are there. What is missing is the unglamorous paperwork that converts a promise into a payment.
For ministries of agriculture, finance and planning across the continent – including in Harare – that means building teams who can speak both policy and project-finance language: staff who can move from a line in a CAADP framework to a detailed irrigation proposal, from a nutrition target to a viable school feeding programme, from a climate commitment to a solar-powered cold chain for horticulture exports.
Until that happens at scale, the money pledged in rooms like the Kigali Convention Centre will continue to do what it has done for much of the past two decades.
Wait.
Available, but unspent. While farmers, processors and consumers from Masvingo to Maputo look for the investments that turn continental ambition into food on the table.
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