When a shipment is delayed, a fertiliser price rises, or a currency weakens, the impact is felt far from the trading floor. It is felt by the farmer deciding whether to plant, the miller managing input costs, the trader waiting at a border, the parent buying food and the finance minister trying to protect households without undermining investment. This is why Africa’s food agenda can no longer be treated only as an agricultural agenda. It is a business agenda. It is an industrialisation agenda. It is a trade agenda. It is a resilience agenda. Above all, it is a sovereignty agenda.
The Kampala Full Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Declaration provides a framework for building resilient and sustainable agrifood systems by 2035. Its importance lies in what it asks the continent to do differently. It must not become another well-written continental commitment. It must become a delivery platform that turns national plans into bankable investments, regional markets into functioning value chains and public ambition into measurable results. Kampala should be understood as a market-building agenda: a shift from declarations to bankable investment, regional trade and measurable results.
A Shift Toward Execution
This delivery logic is also at the heart of the 2025-2029 strategy of the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD). The agency positions itself as the African Union’s development implementation agency, focused on moving from programme coordination to scaled delivery leadership. It brings together five broad priorities: infrastructure and industrialisation; agriculture, food systems, resilient environment and blue economy; skills, entrepreneurship and education; health and wellbeing; and institutional development and public sector governance. While Africa possesses large and growing food markets, a young workforce, expanding cities, and entrepreneurial farmers, the system connecting these assets remains uneven. The gap in reliable finance, quality logistics, predictable policy, efficient regional trade, and credible delivery institutions is the space Kampala must close, which AUDA-NEPAD addresses through inclusive national implementation, data, blended financing, and science, technology and innovation.
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In this sense, Kampala is not a stand-alone food policy. It is one of the clearest tests of whether Africa can connect its strategic plan to markets, finance and execution. For investors, development finance institutions, governments and African entrepreneurs, Kampala sets out targets that speak directly to the continent’s economic transformation. These include a 45% increase in agrifood output, a 50% reduction in post-harvest losses, a tripling of intra-African agrifood trade and $100bn in new public, private and blended investment by 2035. These are not technical targets for ministries of agriculture alone. They are signals to banks, insurers, logistics companies, processors, input suppliers, technology firms, commodity exchanges, development finance institutions and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). They point to where Africa’s next generation of agribusiness opportunity will come from: productivity, storage, processing, finance, trade, nutrition, circularity, climate resilience and blue economy value chains.
Recent global shocks have exposed the cost of dependence. When fertiliser markets are disrupted, African producers pay more or apply less. When shipping corridors are disturbed, freight costs rise and food imports become more expensive. When global commodity prices move, poor households feel the pressure immediately.
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