For nearly 40 years, Africa has been trying to engineer an agricultural revolution. What makes the continuing struggle remarkable is not that the technologies have failed. Quite often, they have worked.
Improved seeds, fertiliser and better agronomy have repeatedly produced large yield gains on African farms. Beginning in 1986, the Sasakawa Africa Association, founded through the efforts of Norman Borlaug, Ryoichi Sasakawa and former American president Jimmy Carter, helped establish more than half a million large demonstration plots between 1986 and 2000. Its experience across countries, including Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mali and Uganda, convinced its organisers that farmers would adopt improved technologies when they could see the benefits. (Sasakawa Africa Association)
Yet there has been no continent-wide equivalent of the transformation that swept much of Asian agriculture in the second half of the 20th century.
That distinction matters. Africa is not devoid of agricultural success. Ethiopia, for example, has recorded major productivity and commercialisation gains in selected agricultural clusters. The more defensible question is why such successes have not become sufficiently broad, self-sustaining and interconnected to transform agriculture across much of the continent.
The answer is increasingly apparent: Africa’s central agricultural constraint is not primarily a technology problem and certainly not a farmer problem. It is a systems-and-scale problem.
A seed is not an agricultural system. Neither is a bag of fertiliser.
A farmer can double a maize harvest and still be worse off if there is no affordable credit, the road to market is impassable, storage is inadequate and increased local production or food imports causes prices to collapse. A technically successful technology becomes economically unattractive when the system around it fails.
This is precisely what four decades of intervention have gradually revealed.
Africa still uses remarkably little fertiliser relative to other regions. FAO data put average inorganic fertiliser use in 2020 at about 26 kg of nutrients per hectare of cropland in Africa, against 187 kg in Asia. (Open Knowledge FAO) That gap helps explain the Abuja Fertiliser Summit of 2006 and the subsequent push to expand fertiliser access.
But fertiliser demonstrates the problem perfectly. It has to be manufactured or imported, financed, transported hundreds of kilometres inland, stocked by agro-dealers and purchased by farmers before a crop generates income. It must also be correctly matched to soils and used with suitable seed and agronomic knowledge. Fixing only one link achieves little.
Rainfall compounds the difficulty. Much of African food production remains rain-fed; historically, Sub-Saharan Africa has irrigated a far smaller share of cultivated land than Asia. (FAOHome) A farmer borrowing to buy better seed and fertiliser is therefore not merely making an investment. She is making a bet on the weather. If the rains fail, the harvest disappears but the debt does not.
What is sometimes called farmers’ resistance to technology is therefore often rational risk management.
The same system problem appears after harvest. Higher production requires drying, warehouses, transport, processing and buyers. Without them, successful farmers can encounter a perverse outcome: more production, lower prices and little improvement in income.
Farmers, after all, do not produce yields. They produce livelihoods.
African institutions have increasingly recognised this.
The African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, launched through the Maputo process in 2003 and renewed at Malabo in 2014, has progressively shifted from production targets toward a broader conception of agricultural transformation. Its latest framework, the Kampala CAADP Declaration and Strategy for 2026-2035, is explicitly about transforming agrifood systems. The AU wants to mobilise $100bn, raise agrifood output by 45 per cent, triple intra-African agricultural trade and halve post-harvest losses by 2035. (African Union)
The African Development Bank travelled a similar intellectual path. Its Feed Africa strategy, adopted in 2016, argued that transformation requires not only productivity-enhancing technologies but also functioning input and output markets and a competitive private sector capable of scaling successful businesses. (African Development Bank). The Bank invested $13 billion between 2016 and 2015 in different parts of agricultural commodity value chains, local fertiliser manufacturing and rural road/storage infrastructure.
Its Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation programme, a flagship of the Bank’s Feed Africa strategy, aimed to take technologies such as heat-tolerant wheat, drought-adapted maize and improved rice to 40 million farmers. During the food shock following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the bank went further, establishing a $1.5bn African Emergency Food Production Facility (AEFPF), designed to give 20 million farmers access to certified seed and fertiliser and generate 38 million tonnes of additional food. (African Development Bank). It eventually reached 15 million farmers across the continent, including Nigeria, gave out 406,000 tonnes of improved seeds and 2.9 million tonnes of fertiliser and produced 45.1 million tonnes of food. In Nigeria, a US$134 million loan under AEFPF helped distribute 6,000 tonnes of heat-tolerant seeds to 386,762 wheat farmers over the 2023/2024 and 2024/2025 wheat seasons, producing 1.592 million tonnes, the highest ever production in the country’s history.
These interventions demonstrate Africa’s capacity to mobilise at scale in a crisis. They also expose the uncomfortable question: why must functioning input-delivery systems so often be created by special programmes rather than existing permanently?
Ethiopia offers one possible answer.
In 2010 it created the Agricultural Transformation Agency, now the Agricultural Transformation Institute, not principally to invent new technologies but to identify bottlenecks, coordinate institutions and improve government delivery. A World Bank review described the model as an important institutional approach to agricultural policy implementation, while also noting the capacity limitations of the government bodies responsible for ultimately executing reforms. (World Bank).
Nigeria implemented a similar ATA programme under the erstwhile Minister of Agriculture and immediate past President of the African Development Bank, Dr Akinwumi Adesina. ATA Nigeria reached 15 million farmers over four years and produced an additional 21 million tonnes of food. ATA did not continue after the Jonathan administration.
Ethiopia’s Agricultural Commercialisation Clusters show what a systems approach can accomplish. Between 2019 and 2025 the programme reached more than 4.4 million farmers. ATI reports that yields in participating districts averaged 32 per cent above the national average, rising to 44 per cent above the average among farmers organised into production clusters. The share of grain commercialised rose from about 28 per cent in 2019 to 58 per cent in 2024. (ATI)
The significance is not simply that farmers produced more. Inputs, extension, aggregation and markets were deliberately connected.
That may be the central lesson of Africa’s unfinished agricultural transformation.
Every solution creates demand for another institution. Improved seed requires seed companies and regulators. Fertiliser requires credit and distribution. Credit requires insurance and risk management. Higher yields require storage. Storage requires markets. Markets require roads and processing. Processing requires electricity. New technologies require extension. And all of them require governments capable of coordinating public institutions and private businesses over decades.
Development projects can demonstrate these connections. They cannot permanently substitute for them.
Africa does not need another demonstration that its farmers can produce. Forty years of experimentation have settled that question.
The challenge is to make the conditions temporarily assembled around successful projects — finance, technology, extension, infrastructure, storage, markets and competent public institutions — the ordinary conditions under which millions of farmers operate every season.
When that happens, Africa will no longer need to search for its Green Revolution. It will have built one.
Martin Fregene is Director of Agriculture and Agro-Industry at the African Development Bank, where he leads the Bank’s Feed Africa strategy, including the flagship programmes Technology for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) and Transformation of the African Savannah Initiative (TASI).
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