Summit Sets $300m Investment Pipeline Target To Double Africa’s Agric GDP

The Agriculture Summit Africa (ASA) has set a $300 million investment pipeline target for Africa’s agriculture sector, as conveners move to connect viable agribusiness opportunities with investors and development finance institutions to ultimately double Africa’s agriculture GDP output.

Held under the theme, ‘Building the Next Superpower: Africa’s Food Power Play,’ the two-day Summit hosted over 12,000 participants and sought to translate discussions into deployable capital.

The Summit focused on a longstanding contradiction at the heart of African agriculture: a continent with vast agricultural resources and production potential that continues to import significant volumes of food, struggle with limited access to finance and capture too little of the value created between farm and consumer. In Nigeria, for example, agriculture contributes close to a quarter of economic output but receives less than five percent of banking industry lending.

The managing director and chief executive officer of Sterling Bank, Abubakar Suleiman stated that “closing that gap requires more than another conversation about agriculture. It requires capital, risk-sharing, infrastructure and deliberate ownership of the systems around production.”

“The true measure of a summit is not the quality of its speeches, rather, it is the quantity of its consequences. Our work is to convert conversations into projects, projects into finance, finance into productive capacity, and productive capacity into affordable food,” Suleiman said.

He argued that increasing the volume of capital would solve only part of the problem.

Pointing to cassava, he said Nigeria produces more cassava than any other country yet accounts for only about two percent of the global processed cassava market.

He disclosed that for Sterling, execution will continue beyond the Summit, saying that the Bank will help structure opportunities emerging from ASA 2026, support financing for shortlisted projects and track conversion of commitments into deployed capital.

According to him, the Bank has already mobilised more than $100 million in blended finance from development partners and is developing infrastructure including FarmPass, developed with Rabobank and Mastercard, which aims to bring 250,000 smallholder farmers into formal finance over seven years, and AgricHub, a platform to connect farmers with financiers and markets.