Africa is at a turning point. With the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) now taking shape, the continent has an opportunity to rethink how it feeds itself and does business. Rather than relying heavily on food imports while exporting raw agricultural commodities with limited local value, African countries can build stronger regional value chains, process more food closer to home and create more resilient economies.
A newly launched $200 million climate finance facility is adding momentum to this effort, supporting initiatives designed to unlock agriculture’s potential, create jobs and encourage more climate-resilient growth.
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Africa imports more than $50 billion worth of processed food annually, a figure projected to reach $110 billion by 2030. Meanwhile, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana produce about 65 per cent of the world’s cocoa but capture only a small share of the global chocolate market. Similar patterns exist across commodities such as cashews and coffee, where much of the higher-value processing takes place outside the continent.
This represents a significant opportunity. Expanding domestic processing could generate billions of dollars in additional economic activity while creating millions of jobs. For Africa, the challenge is no longer simply producing more food, but capturing more value from what it already produces.
The AfCFTA provides an important platform for achieving this. Greater implementation of the agreement could significantly increase intra-African agricultural trade by reducing tariffs, simplifying cross-border commerce and encouraging investment in regional processing industries. Its rules of origin can also encourage local production by requiring goods to undergo substantial transformation within Africa.
West Africa provides a useful example. The region imports billions of dollars of rice annually, with Nigeria accounting for a significant share despite its considerable agricultural potential. Developing agricultural corridors that connect producers, processors and large consumer markets across countries could create economies of scale that individual nations would struggle to achieve alone.
Cassava offers another opportunity. Nigeria produces tens of millions of tonnes annually, yet only a small proportion undergoes industrial processing. With global demand for cassava starch and other derivatives expanding, greater investment in processing could turn the crop into a major source of export revenue, industrial inputs and employment.
Climate change, however, threatens to undermine these opportunities. Rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns and extreme weather could reduce agricultural productivity across Africa. At the same time, post-harvest losses remain enormous, with inadequate storage, transport and cold-chain infrastructure causing large quantities of food to go to waste.
Investment in rural infrastructure can therefore have a multiplier effect. Solar-powered cold storage, better roads, irrigation, warehouses and reliable electricity can help farmers preserve their produce, reach markets and earn higher incomes. These investments can also make African agriculture more attractive to private capital.
Financing remains another major obstacle. Agricultural businesses across the continent face a substantial funding gap, while commercial banks remain cautious about lending to the sector. Blended finance, combining public or development capital with private investment, can help reduce risks and provide agricultural enterprises with the patient capital needed to expand.
Agro-processing also offers an important answer to Africa’s employment challenge. Processing agricultural products creates more jobs than simply exporting raw commodities, while generating opportunities across transportation, packaging, logistics, marketing and retail. This could be particularly significant for Africa’s rapidly growing youth population and for women, who play a major role in agriculture but remain underrepresented in formal agro-processing employment.
Africa already has many of the ingredients required for an agricultural transformation: vast arable land, a young population, rising urban demand and a continental trade framework.
The opportunity now is to connect these assets.
If African countries can move beyond exporting raw commodities and build integrated regional value chains, agriculture can become more than a means of feeding the continent. It can become a powerful engine of industrialisation, job creation and trade.
Africa does not simply need to produce more. It needs to process more, trade more and capture more of the value created from its own resources.
