When the System Is Tested

“It would be criminal if in 2032 we find ourselves in the same situation and say: six years before, in 2026, we had another shock, and we did nothing substantial.” — H.E. Lionel Zinsou, on the margins of the Africa Forward Summit

It was a remarkable reflection on whether this moment becomes another crisis we survived, or the point at which we chose to build differently.

Twenty years ago, AGRA was founded on a belief that Africa’s food systems would only succeed if African farmers and institutions were at the centre of the solution. Two decades on, that belief has been tested repeatedly, by drought, by a global pandemic, by supply chain disruptions that no one in 2006 could have mapped.

Each time, the question has been the same: does the system hold? And each time, the honest answer has required us to look at what we have built alongside governments, farmers and partners, and ask what still needs to change.

That question has never felt more urgent than now. Disruptions to global shipping through the Strait of Hormuz have removed a significant portion of fertiliser supply from accessible markets, contributing to a nearly 50 percent rise in global urea prices.

For many African households, where food already represents half of daily expenditure, the consequences are immediate: higher fertiliser costs push up food prices, and the burden is carried first by the same smallholder farmers that AGRA has worked alongside for twenty years.

This is the nature of structural vulnerability. It does not announce itself only in times of crisis. It is present in every season where farmers cannot afford the inputs their soils need, every harvest where the price they receive for their produce does not cover what it cost them to grow it, and every government budget that cuts agricultural development spending when an external shock hits.

Resilience, as AGRA has learned over two decades, is not the absence of shock. It is the capacity of farmers, communities and systems to absorb pressure and continue to deliver.

On 11 May, on the margins of the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, AGRA joined the ONE Campaign and Climate Action Platform Africa to convene a high-level roundtable on exactly this question. The conversation brought together voices from development finance, government, the private sector and entrepreneurship, and produced five points of convergence that we believe can anchor a shared agenda.

The structural diagnosis is no longer in dispute: Africa’s food systems remain too exposed to external shocks, even as many of the technologies and locally produced solutions that can reduce import dependence already exist on the continent. The challenge now is to make farming more profitable, to design financing with African institutions from the outset, and to back the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) as the continent’s policy framework for agricultural transformation, food security, nutrition and inclusive growth.

Properly resourced, and held to account, CAADP remains the north star. What the roundtable also surfaced, and what twenty years of AGRA’s work confirms, is that resilience is not built in response to crisis. It is built before one arrives.

In the communities where AGRA has worked, resilience looks like a farmer who can access improved seed, locally relevant advice and a functioning market before the next season begins. It looks like village-based advisors (VBAs), who are trusted farmers in their communities and help other farmers improve how they grow, access inputs, understand their soils, and increase their yields and incomes.

It also shows itself as a consortia model, which brings together government, private sector actors, off-takers, agro-dealers, financial institutions and community-based extension networks so that support does not reach farmers as isolated projects, but as part of a functioning local system. It looks like a women-led agribusiness in Malawi with access to credit through VALUE4HER that does not disappear when global commodity prices move.

The food corridors that AGRA has been championing carry this logic further. By creating the commercial architecture that connects African surplus to African demand, by reducing dependence on supply chains that African governments do not control, and by building the market predictability that locally produced inputs need in order to scale, food corridors are infrastructure for resilience.

Not in the abstract, but in the practical sense of what it means for a farmer to have a buyer, a fair price, advisory support within reach, and a system that does not collapse when the world does.

As AGRA marks twenty years this August, resilience is the right theme for this moment. What we are marking is the accumulation of capacity, knowledge, partnerships and institutional presence that means Africa is better placed today than it was in 2006 to respond to the next shock, and to build systems that require less response every time.

The goal is not to be in the same room in 2032 saying the same things. The goal is to ensure that by then, the system holds.