Former presidential candidate, Kingsley Maghalu key note address at 20th Anniversary of AGRA in Nairobi

 

" Yesterday in Nairobi, I delivered the Keynote Address at the 20th Anniversary of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa ( AGRA ) titled “A Harvest That Employs the Century: Yields, Value Chains, and the 2050 Workforce”. In it, I laid out a broad strategic agenda to improve the productivity, value chains, and governance capabilities of African agriculture. 

Africa can turn agriculture from a low-productivity employer of last resort into a growth engine. It cannot do so by expanding acreage. It can do so by closing enormous yield gaps on existing land, capturing value that now leaks offshore or rots after harvest, building state capacity that treats food systems as a single interconnected problem, and making the sector a destination for skilled young people rather than an exit ramp. Four main strategic thrusts for the next two decades to 2050:

High-yield seeds on less acreage (productivity first, land last)

Focus on intensification, not extensification. Stop measuring success by hectares planted. National scorecards should track yield per hectare, nutrient-use efficiency, and output per worker. Area expansion should require an environmental and land-rights test.

Increased and improved investment in value chains

Build processing next to production, not only in capital cities. Treat cold chain, storage, and rural roads as agricultural policy. Use development finance to crowd in private midstream capital, not replace it. Measure value-chain investment by three numbers: share of production that is processed domestically, post-harvest loss rate by commodity, and farmer share of retail price.

Policy capabilities for interconnected challenges

Create a food-systems cabinet cluster, not an isolated ministry of agriculture. 

Fix the three policy failures that kill private investment: insecure land tenure (especially for women and youth), unpredictable trade bans and export restrictions, and late payment by public buyers. Land administration reform and digitized titles are agricultural policy.

Build domestic policy analytics. Few ministries can model the fiscal cost of a fertilizer subsidy versus a feeder-road programme, or the employment effect of a cassava industrial park.

Build an agriculture -targeted skilled workforce — reverse the exit, of youth labor from agriculture, using the 2050 labour wave.

Africa’s working-age population is projected to rise from under 900 million in the mid-2020s to about 1.6 billion by 2050. Sub-Saharan Africa’s share of the global working-age population is headed toward roughly a quarter by mid-century; That is only a dividend if people are productive.

The goal is not to trap young people on one-hectare plots. It is to make the whole food system—seed, mechanization, irrigation, processing, logistics, veterinary services, digital advisory, finance, quality control—a skilled career track.

Congratulations to Alice Ruhweza  and her team at AGRA on great work so far. More to do!"