Agricultural resilience as a critical determinant of food security outcomes.
COP30 once again delivered a familiar outcome: ambitious global narratives, renewed climate commitments, and a growing sense of frustration among several African leaders. While headline climate finance figures continue to rise on paper, adaptation funding, particularly for agriculture and food systems, remains structurally insufficient, slow to deploy, and poorly aligned with country-level realities.
This matters because agriculture remains central to African economies, employing a large share of the labour force, often around 50 to 60 percent in many countries, and contributing a significant share of GDP, commonly in the range of 20 to 30 percent. Beyond its economic weight, agriculture is central to food security, social stability, and political cohesion. Yet the sector faces compounding pressures, including climate volatility, water stress, declining soil fertility, weak agro-industrial value chains, and rising dependence on food imports. As previously highlighted by AfricanPact, food insecurity has become a macro-critical vulnerability for the continent.
Against this backdrop, recent pledges and investments reflect a pragmatic shift from global signalling to targeted, country-level action in agriculture, agro-industry, and climate resilience. This trend underscores the growing primacy of national execution in shaping food security outcomes.
Recent Country-Level Partnerships & Investments
Morocco — $420 M Japan-Financed Irrigation Investment
Morocco has signed a $420.1 million loan agreement with Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to finance a major hydro-agricultural development project in the Gharb region, as the country accelerates efforts to address water scarcity and safeguard food security under worsening climate conditions. The project focuses on upgrading irrigation canals and water-management infrastructure across the Gharb plain, one of Morocco’s most productive agricultural basins. Its strength lies in both scale and targeting, securing water supply where agricultural output is most concentrated while aligning with the country’s long-term Generation Green strategy. This investment demonstrates that in water-stressed economies, irrigation infrastructure is the single most decisive agricultural investment.
DRC — $87 M for Sustainable Agroforestry
The DRC’s $87 million agroforestry programme illustrates an integrated approach linking food production, rural incomes, and environmental preservation. Four pilot projects in the Bankana area will combine cassava processing with sustainable charcoal production under an agroforestry model designed to reduce pressure on natural forests. Backed by Germany, Norway, and the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI), the programme deploys blended finance to de-risk private investment in deforestation-free value chains. Its relevance is inherently national, as it seeks to reconcile agricultural expansion with protection of the Congo Basin. The strategic lesson is clear: without viable, income-generating agricultural value chains, conservation policies lack durability.
Sahel — $14.6 M ADF Grant for Climate-Smart Agriculture
The African Development Fund’s $14.6 million grant targets one of Africa’s most structurally fragile regions, where climate shocks rapidly translate into food and nutrition crises. The programme focuses on strengthening community-level adaptation capacity as climate extremes intensify across the Sahel. Its design rests on a dual logic, scaling up climate-smart villages anchored in hydro-agricultural infrastructure while improving access to climate information to support local decision-making. The grant also reinforces regional seed systems through the dissemination of resilient, improved varieties adapted to Sahelian conditions. Its specificity lies in its integrated approach, treating infrastructure, agronomic practices, and climate intelligence as mutually reinforcing pillars of resilience rather than isolated interventions.
Ghana — $9.5 M KOICA Grant for Agro-Industrial Value Chains
Ghana has secured a $9.5 million grant from South Korea to implement a five-year programme aimed at strengthening agro-industrial value chains in the Central and Volta regions. The project focuses on expanding agro-processing capacity, improving market systems, and reducing post-harvest losses through the construction of processing centres, targeted capacity-building, and more efficient marketing channels. While modest in financial scale, the initiative addresses a structural constraint in Ghana’s agricultural economy, namely weak value addition. Its strategic significance lies in shifting agriculture beyond primary production toward agro-industrial competitiveness, rural employment, and income diversification.
Morocco — $525m AfDB Credit Guarantee for OCP’s Low-Carbon Transition (Non-Sovereign)
The African Development Bank has approved a credit guarantee of up to €450 million, to support OCP Group’s low-carbon transition strategy by enabling access to long-term financing from international financial institutions. While this is not a sovereign investment, it is strategically significant for Morocco’s agricultural ecosystem. The guarantee supports OCP’s multi-billion-dollar transition toward low-carbon fertiliser production through renewable energy, desalinated water, and efficiency gains across energy- and water-intensive operations. By strengthening the resilience of a critical upstream agricultural input, the transaction links industrial transformation with food-system stability and national resilience.
Gates Foundation — $1.4 B for Climate-Resilient Agriculture (Pledge)
The Gates Foundation’s $1.4 billion pledge announced at COP30 targets one of the most vulnerable segments of Africa’s food system, namely smallholder farmers exposed to increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather. The funding prioritises climate-resilient seeds, digital advisory services, and data-driven decision tools to strengthen farm-level productivity and resilience. Its specificity lies in focusing on adaptation at the producer level rather than on large-scale infrastructure. The implication is straightforward: Africa’s food security will ultimately be determined by the resilience of millions of smallholder farms.
Cross Cutting Lessons
The common thread across these investments is not their scale, but their intent. They point to a shift away from global declarations toward more country-led approaches to securing Africa’s food systems, even if this shift remains uneven and incomplete.
Taken together, this cross-section of country-level investments suggest an emerging reorientation in how food security and agricultural resilience are being addressed across the continent. Rather than relying solely on broad climate commitments or generic sector strategies, capital is increasingly being channeled toward binding constraints within national ecosystems. These include water scarcity in Morocco, climate volatility in the Sahel, forest–agriculture trade-offs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, weak value addition in Ghana, upstream input sustainability through OCP, and productivity risks at the smallholder level. In each case, solutions are shaped by local agro-ecological conditions and economic structures, underscoring the limits of one-size-fits-all policy frameworks.
This set of investments also underscores the continued centrality of public, concessional, and philanthropic capital in absorbing early risk through loans, grants, blended finance, or credit guarantees. This reflects the still-limited appetite of private capital for primary agriculture and climate adaptation in the absence of de-risking mechanisms. At the same time, food security is increasingly framed as a macroeconomic and strategic concern, linked to import dependence, price stability, employment, and national resilience.
If these investments offer early signals rather than a systemic shift, the challenge ahead lies in turning intent into durable, large-scale execution.
Looking Forward
Looking ahead, Africa’s food security will depend primarily on national leadership and execution rather than on the volume of global commitments. African countries will need to define and lead their own agendas, mobilising both public and private domestic investment around clear priorities such as water security, productivity, value addition, and resilient inputs, with growth as the central objective. Climate resilience, in agriculture and across other climate-exposed sectors, will only be sustainable if it supports economic expansion and is delivered through pragmatic, country-driven action at scale.
Partnerships and technology will continue to play an important enabling role, but they cannot substitute for strategy. Development partners, DFIs, and private investors can accelerate delivery and help de-risk capital when aligned with national priorities, while technology adds value when it is context-specific, affordable, and scalable. In this context, adaptation anchored in growth and effective execution remains the central priority.