This week, once again, the leaders of a continent are gathered in Kigali Rwanda. We convene at the Africa Food Systems Forum, and this year is unlike any other. It is not simply another summit. It is a reckoning. Twenty years ago, in Addis Ababa, a Ghanaian diplomat who had spent his life inside the machinery of the United Nations stood before African leaders and made three prophecies. Kofi Annan did not merely diagnose Africa’s hunger; he issued a challenge.
“Let us generate a uniquely African green revolution,” he said, “a revolution that is long overdue, a revolution that will help the continent in its quest for dignity and peace.” Out of that single address came three institutions that still shape the continent’s food future. The first was a body to do the work: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, AGRA, born in 2006 with Annan as its founding chairman. The second was a wish, that scientists, policymakers, farmers and financiers would never again work in silos, but would gather regularly to compare notes, confront failure honestly, and course-correct together. That wish first took shape in Oslo, Norway, in a series of conferences from 2006 to 2008, before crossing to Accra in 2010 as the African Green Revolution Forum, and evolving into what convenes this week as the Africa Food Systems Forum.
The third was Annan’s insistence that a continent quick to criticise must also learn to celebrate, to look backward with honesty at who did good, and forward with ambition to inspire others to do better. That instinct became the Africa Food Prize; whose secretariat I have the honour of leading. Three instruments. One vision. Twenty years on, all three converge in Kigali this week for what may be the most consequential gathering in the Forum’s history, not because we have arrived, but because we have finally assembled the evidence to ask, without flinching, whether we did.
My own answer is clear: Africa has built institutions, generated gains and kept agricultural transformation on the continental agenda, but it has not yet built delivery systems strong enough to turn productivity into reliable incomes, jobs and resilience for the people who matter most. That evidence sits in a document AGRA has just published: the AGRA@20 Impact, Learning and Foresight Report. I want to be direct with you about why this report matters more than the usual anniversary retrospective that institutions produce to flatter themselves. It does not flatter us.
It is, by design, an honest account, drawing on independent evaluations, not just our own telling of our own story, of what a continent-wide effort to reignite African agriculture actually achieved, and what it did not. I urge every minister, every civil servant, every farmer leader and every partner gathered in Kigali this week to read it. Not the press release. The report.
Here is what it says, in language stripped of the diplomatic softening that usually accompanies these documents: productivity gains where AGRA worked have been real and substantial, supported by investments in seed systems, farmer services, policy reform and institutional partnerships. But income gains for the farmers who mattered most have been partial.
Markets did not follow seeds into the ground the way we assumed they would. Inclusive finance, the capital that turns a good harvest into a durable livelihood, did not arrive at the scale or speed the moment demanded. The report’s central lesson is therefore not that Africa lacked effort; it is that production gains without market access, finance, accountable institutions and last-mile delivery do not automatically become prosperity.
Twenty years of experience distilled into four hard questions that I believe should now occupy every government on this continent: Where did our support leave behind institutions and capabilities that outlived our funding, and where did progress evaporate the moment the money stopped? What capabilities do we still lack to convert production into income, resilience and dignified work? Which outcomes can we honestly claim credit for, and where have we been quietly hiding behind the word “catalytic” to avoid accountability? And have we done enough, genuinely enough, for the women and young people who form the backbone of this sector but the margins of its rewards?
I do not ask these questions as an outside observer. My own understanding of delivery was forged in Uganda, inside the very rooms where policy ambition meets the hard walls of administration. I started my public service life as a young economist in the Ministry of Agriculture, drafting policies, preparing briefs, and learning quickly that a good policy document is only the beginning of the journey.
Later, I found myself defending the agriculture sector budget at the Ministry of Finance, where every promise to farmers had to compete with roads, health, education, security and debt obligations. I then served at the National Planning Authority, where one of my responsibilities was to lead the drafting of the National Development Plan.
Those experiences taught me a lesson I still carry: transformation is not achieved by working for government from the outside; it is built by working in and within government, understanding its constraints, its rhythms, its incentives and its weaknesses.
That experience also taught me to respect the complexity of government. It is easy, from a conference platform or a donor boardroom, to ask why a project has not delivered. It is harder, but more honest, to look at what happens inside the system: procurement processes that take months or years; implementation units that are designed to satisfy lender rules more than farmer realities; disbursement delays that miss the planting season; consultants who understand the reporting template better than the district agricultural officer understands the project; and large World Bank or African Development Bank loans that enter the national debt stock long before they enter a farmer’s field.
By the time the headline announces a half-billion-dollar agricultural transformation project, the taxpayer has already inherited the obligation, while the actual delivery may still be trapped in approvals, no-objections, procurement disputes and implementation bottlenecks. This is why I believe local media, citizens and parliaments must ask more honest questions.
When government borrows in the name of agriculture, who is responsible for delivery? When a loan is approved, where is the execution plan that protects the farmer and the taxpayer at the same time? When procurement delays push inputs beyond the season, who accounts for that lost harvest? When project money is absorbed by vehicles, workshops, consultancies and coordination meetings, what exactly reaches the village? And when a project closes with low disbursement, weak results and a repayment schedule that will outlive the political term that approved it, should we still call that development?
This is the uncomfortable truth I want this article to leave with you, because it is the one message from AGRA@20 that matters more than any other for the work I care about most: the work of governments, and what they must now do differently.
First, governments must stop outsourcing the idea of delivery while retaining only the ceremony of ownership. I learned this lesson in Uganda, where the most effective reforms were never those written entirely by outsiders, however brilliant their consultants may have been. They were the reforms owned, argued over, budgeted for and implemented by public servants who understood the political economy of their own country.
Too often, “country-led” has meant a government that signs the communiqué and opens the workshop, while consultants and donor-funded project units quietly run the actual programme. That must end. Consultants and development partners have a role, but it is to support government leadership, never to substitute for it. A ministry that cannot explain its own delivery numbers without a consultant’s slide deck has not been strengthened; it has been made dependent.
Second, we need instruments of radical honesty: scorecards, not communiqués. Kofi Annan’s third prophecy, the Africa Food Prize, was built on the premise that recognition changes behaviour: what gets measured and celebrated gets replicated. I believe the same logic must now be applied ruthlessly to government performance itself. Every country that signed the Kampala CAADP Declaration this year committed to specific, measurable targets, on budget allocation, on productivity, on governance.
We should build, publish and defend a continental scorecard that tracks, country by country, whether that 10% budget commitment first made at Maputo in 2003 is actually being met; whether extension services reach the last mile; whether procurement for agricultural inputs is transparent enough to survive a journalist’s inquiry. A scorecard is not a punishment. It is a mirror. Africa’s farmers deserve a mirror as unflinching as the one AGRA has just held up to itself.
Third, accountability must have teeth, and corruption must have consequences. It is not enough to speak of “leakages” in soft, technocratic language at conferences like this one. Every diverted bag of subsidised fertiliser is a farmer’s child who does not eat, a harvest that does not happen, a young person who concludes, correctly, that agriculture is a sector for the connected, not the industrious. If we want the youth this Forum claims to champion to see a future in farming, they must first see a system that rewards effort over proximity to power.
I make this argument not as an outsider lecturing government, but as someone who has been in the room, who has defended a sector budget line by line, who has watched a good policy struggle to become a funded programme, and who has seen how public servants can be blamed for failures that are often designed into the system itself.
I also know that government can deliver when political leadership is clear, when the treasury releases funds on time, when procurement is transparent, when implementing agencies are empowered, and when citizens demand results rather than announcements. Those examples exist. They are not hypothetical. They are the reason I still believe, twenty years after Kofi Annan’s prophecies and after everything the AGRA@20 report tells us we got wrong, that this continent’s transformation is still within reach, if we are willing to look honestly at the scorecard and act on what it tells us.
Kigali this week is not a celebration for celebration’s sake. It is Africa’s institutions, the one Kofi Annan built, the platform he willed into being, and the prize he inspired, converging to ask the only question that matters after twenty years: has Africa delivered? The evidence says: partially, unevenly, and not nearly enough. The next twenty years will be decided not by the ambition of our declarations, but by the discipline of our delivery: governments must publish the scorecards, fund the delivery units, protect procurement from capture, and hold themselves publicly accountable for results. That responsibility does not belong to donors. It never did. It belongs to us.
