For more than a decade, Africa has attracted billions of dollars in agricultural development finance aimed at transforming farming, improving food security, and raising the incomes of millions of smallholder farmers.
Yet a troubling contradiction is emerging from the numbers: Africa is producing more agricultural output, but the gains have barely kept pace with population growth, while the number of people facing hunger has increased sharply.
Between 2015 and 2024, approximately US$62 billion in official external agricultural finance was disbursed to Africa, according to figures cited by Steve Monty, Senior Director of Farmer Initiatives at the World Agriculture Forum. Annual disbursements rose from about US$4.5 billion in 2015 to US$8.7 billion in 2024.
At the same time, Africa’s agricultural output increased from an estimated US$313 billion in 2015 to US$388 billion in 2024. On the surface, that appears to be progress. However, when population growth is taken into account, the picture becomes considerably less encouraging.
Africa’s population grew by almost the same proportion during the period, meaning agricultural output per person barely changed. “Growth happened, but transformation did not,” Monty argues in an analysis of Africa’s agricultural financing and food-security challenge. The cereal figures tell a similar story.
African cereal production increased from approximately 188 million tons in 2015 to 223 million tons in 2024, an increase of about 18.5 percent. But population growth was faster, causing cereal production per person to fall from roughly 154 kilograms to about 147 kilograms.
Meanwhile, much of the increase in cereal production came from expanding cultivated land rather than substantially improving productivity. Land used for cereal production increased by more than 15 percent, while yields rose by only around 3 percent. For a continent confronting climate change, land degradation, water shortages, and rapid population growth, that trend raises important questions about the sustainability of the current agricultural model.
More land, but little productivity growth
Agricultural transformation is generally expected to mean producing more from the same, or fewer, resources. Yet Africa’s cereal yields have remained stubbornly low. Data cited from the African Development Bank indicate that cereal yields stood at roughly 1.69 tons per hectare in 2020 and around 1.68 tons per hectare in 2024, representing virtually no progress over four years.
This is significant because agricultural programs across the continent have invested heavily in improved seeds, irrigation, mechanization, extension services, digital agriculture, infrastructure, and finance.
Although individual interventions have produced positive results, the aggregate numbers suggest that these gains have not yet translated into continent-wide productivity growth at the scale required. And that leads to perhaps the most uncomfortable statistic: hunger.
Approximately 194 million Africans were undernourished in 2015. By 2024, the number had risen to more than 300 million. The prevalence of undernourishment also increased from roughly 16 percent of the population to about 20 percent. In addition, the number of people experiencing moderate or severe food insecurity rose from approximately 564 million in 2015 to more than 850 million by 2023.
The figures do not mean that agricultural development finance itself caused hunger. That distinction matters. Africa’s food systems have faced a series of major shocks during the period, including the COVID-19 pandemic, extreme weather events, conflicts, fertilizer and energy price increases, disrupted global supply chains, currency depreciation, and food-price inflation.
Besides, food insecurity is not determined by production alone. A country can produce food and still have millions of people unable to afford it. But these explanations also strengthen the case for examining whether agricultural investments are building systems capable of absorbing shocks.
The project success paradox
There is another important part of the story. Not every agricultural project has failed. Far from it.
Farmers in different parts of Africa have benefited from irrigation schemes, improved seeds, training, finance, market connections, digital technologies, and value-chain investments.
Independent evaluations of agricultural programs supported by development institutions have also documented positive project-level outcomes. The problem, Monty argues, lies somewhere between the successful pilot and the continent-wide transformation policymakers repeatedly promise. “Africa does not necessarily have a project failure problem. It has a conversion problem,” he writes.
In other words, a project can work for 5,000 farmers without fundamentally changing the agricultural system in which those farmers operate. A farmer may receive training but have no affordable credit. Another may receive finance but lack a reliable market. A cooperative may secure buyers but lack cold storage, logistics, or traceability.
A technology company may successfully register thousands of farmers digitally but fail to connect them to finance, insurance, or paying customers. Meanwhile, a development program may distribute inputs without creating a sustainable market for what farmers eventually produce. Each intervention can therefore appear successful in isolation while the farmer remains trapped in a fragmented system.
The missing connections
This fragmentation is increasingly becoming a central challenge for African agriculture. Farmers, governments, banks, insurers, buyers, input suppliers, technology companies, extension officers, and logistics providers all operate within the same agricultural economy. However, they often operate through different databases, contracts, platforms, incentives, and information systems.
The result can be duplicated farmer registration, repeated assessments, fragmented financing, and limited visibility over what happens after a development project ends. “Money enters one side of the system, but the expected transformation does not consistently emerge from the other,” Monty says.
The challenge, therefore, may not simply be how much money reaches agriculture, but how effectively that money is converted into measurable improvements in farmers’ lives.
Did productivity increase? Did farmers earn more? Did they gain reliable access to markets? Did food become more affordable? Did private investors become more willing to finance agriculture? Did the intervention continue after donor funding ended? And, crucially, did a successful project expand beyond its original boundaries?
These questions could become increasingly important as African governments and development partners prepare the next generation of agricultural investments.
Africa needs agricultural “rails”
Monty argues that the next decade should focus less on isolated interventions and more on building infrastructure that connects the different parts of the agricultural economy.
He describes this as creating the “rails” through which farmer identity, production data, finance, inputs, insurance, logistics, compliance, extension services, market demand, and payments can interact.
The idea is not necessarily to replace existing agricultural platforms, banks, or programs. Rather, it is to make them work together. “The farmer should not have to navigate the development ecosystem. The ecosystem should organize itself around the farmer,” Monty writes.
That shift could also change how agricultural development is measured.
For years, project success has often been communicated through the number of farmers trained, beneficiaries reached, loans disbursed, or dollars mobilized. Those figures remain useful, but they do not necessarily demonstrate lasting transformation. A farmer can be counted as a beneficiary and still remain poor. A project can spend millions of dollars without creating a sustainable economic ecosystem. A technology platform can register thousands of farmers without increasing their incomes. Therefore, the more fundamental question is what happened after the money was spent.
From money mobilized to outcomes delivered
Africa still needs significantly more investment in agriculture. Governments face enormous financing gaps, while smallholder farmers continue to struggle with access to credit, inputs, markets, irrigation, storage, and climate-resilient technologies. The issue, therefore, is not whether Africa should mobilize more capital.
It is whether the next wave of capital will be deployed differently. The experience of the past decade offers a warning: more money does not automatically produce more productivity, higher incomes, or greater food security. What matters is how that money moves through the agricultural system and whether it creates durable connections between farmers and the institutions they depend on.
As climate pressures intensify and Africa’s population continues to grow, the continent has little room for agricultural systems that expand production without significantly improving productivity. The ultimate test of agricultural finance may therefore be brutally simple.
Not how many programs were launched. Not how many dollars were announced. Not how many farmers were registered. But what changed?
As Monty puts it: “It is no longer, ‘How much did we spend?’ It is ‘What changed because we spent it?’”
For Africa’s farmers, and for the millions of people whose access to food depends on them, the answer to that question may become the most important measure of agricultural transformation in the decade ahead.
