Africa’s agricultural sector is not suffering from a shortage of capital, but from a lack of investor confidence, credible institutions, and predictable markets needed to unlock financing at scale, the Executive Secretary of the National Agricultural Development Fund (NADF), Mohammed Ibrahim, has said.
Ibrahim, speaking at the Africa Food Systems Forum (AFSF) in Kigali, Rwanda, said billions of dollars in public, private, and development finance are available globally, yet investors remain hesitant to commit significant resources to African agriculture because of perceived risks and weak market structures.
He opened a high-level panel on ‘Activating Leaders to Unlock Investment in Food Systems.’
He said the priority should be to create an investment environment that channels available capital into productive agricultural ventures.
‘Capital exists. What is often missing is the confidence that allows capital to move,’ Ibrahim said.
He identified reliable agricultural data, identifiable farmers, predictable markets, and credible institutions as critical for reducing investment risks and attracting both domestic and international capital into the sector.
Ibrahim said the inability to provide investors with sufficient certainty remains a major constraint to financing Africa’s food systems, despite the continent’s huge agricultural potential.
He said NADF was therefore moving towards a financing model in which government funds are used to de-risk agriculture and crowd in private capital, rather than to substitute for commercial investment.
‘At NADF, we increasingly believe that public capital should be catalytic rather than substitutive,’ he said.
The NADF chief said the Fund is exploring mechanisms, including blended finance, co-financing, and on-lending, alongside partnerships with banks, insurers, processors, and development institutions, to increase the flow of capital into agriculture.
He explained that government-backed financing should be deployed strategically to address risks and market failures that prevent private investors from participating in the sector.
‘Once those constraints are addressed, larger pools of commercial and development finance can come in,’ he said.
Ibrahim also challenged governments across Africa to rethink how they measure the success of agricultural interventions.
He said the effectiveness of public spending should not be judged solely by the amount of money committed to agriculture but by the additional private investment, jobs, productivity and economic activity generated.
‘Our success should not be measured only by how much government money we deploy. We should also ask: How much additional investment did that public intervention unlock?’ he said.
He argued that such a shift would encourage governments to focus on interventions that create sustainable markets and attract long-term private-sector financing.
The NADF boss also stressed that farmers must be treated as economic actors and investment partners, rather than beneficiaries of government programmes.
‘Farmers are not simply beneficiaries. They are economic actors,’ Ibrahim said.
He said improving farmers’ access to finance, strengthening market linkages and creating commercially viable agricultural enterprises would be critical to attracting investment across Africa’s food systems.
Ibrahim maintained that the continent’s agricultural transformation would ultimately depend on its ability to convince investors that agriculture is not only socially important but also bankable, commercially viable and capable of generating sustainable returns.
He said NADF’s ambition was to help build an agricultural sector in which banks, institutional investors, insurers, and development finance institutions would have greater confidence to commit capital.