Executive Summary
A Historic Gathering for a Just Food Future
In March 2025, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) convened a transformative three-day forum in Nairobi, Kenya, bringing together over 100 participants—farmers, researchers, activists, policymakers, and civil society leaders from across Africa. This landmark event marked a critical turning point in the growing movement to challenge the financial power structures underpinning industrial agriculture and to advance a continental strategy to fund agroecology and food sovereignty. The gathering emerged from a deep recognition: to reclaim Africa’s food systems, we must confront the systems of finance that shape them.
The Financial Drivers of Agricultural Injustice
Across Africa, agriculture is being reshaped by external financial actors—Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), private equity funds, and multinational agribusinesses—whose investments reinforce industrial agriculture at the expense of people and the planet. These financial flows promote genetically modified seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and monoculture systems designed for export, while displacing smallholder farmers, polluting ecosystems, and marginalizing agroecological approaches.
Despite its clear benefits—resilience to climate change, biodiversity preservation, improved nutrition, and local economic development—agroecology receives negligible funding. Between 2016 and 2018, only 2.7% of EU agricultural disbursements to major UN agencies supported agroecology-related initiatives.
Revealing the Impact: Land Grabs, Toxic Inputs, and Seed Monopolies
Participants presented compelling evidence showing how finance is reinforcing harmful agricultural models. DFIs such as the African Development Bank, British International Investment, and Dutch Development Bank funnel money into agro-industrial expansion through opaque private equity funds. In doing so, they contribute to what participants called the “supermarketization” of food systems—where power concentrates in corporate retail chains and smallholder farmers are pushed to the margins.
The impacts on public health and the environment are severe. In Kenya, 76% of pesticides used are classified as highly hazardous, many banned in the Global North. These chemicals contaminate water, damage ecosystems, and increase the burden of non-communicable diseases such as cancer. Meanwhile, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)’s Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Protocol threatens to erode Farmer-Managed Seed Systems (FMSS), enabling multinational control over seeds and weakening African seed sovereignty.
Debt, Dependency, and the Capture of African Agriculture
Speakers also traced the roots of the problem to structural adjustment programs and development loans that have shaped African agricultural policy since the 1980s. The World Bank’s land tenure reforms have commodified land and enabled large-scale land acquisitions by corporations. The AfDB’s agro-industrial strategy seeks to transform over 25 million hectares of land—displacing millions of smallholder farmers in the process. These initiatives are often justified by flawed assumptions: that Africa has vast “unused” land, that industrial agriculture is the only route to food security, and that small-scale farmers must be replaced by export-focused agribusiness.
A Vision for Transformation: Reclaiming Finance for Agroecology
Despite the challenges, the gathering put forward a compelling vision for financial transformation. Participants called for urgent action to redirect public investment toward agroecology. They highlighted the positive steps taken in countries such as Senegal, Mali, Kenya, and The Gambia, where policies and subsidies are beginning to support ecological farming systems.
Beyond budget reallocations, participants envisioned the creation of African-led financial institutions—community investment models, public banks, participatory guarantee systems, and solidarity-based savings groups—to reduce dependence on donor-driven finance. They also proposed bold policy measures to democratize finance: taxing windfall profits, speculative financial markets, and billionaire wealth; shutting down tax havens; and demanding debt cancellation and reparations for slavery and colonialism. These proposals reflect a deep recognition that the financial system itself must be transformed—not just reformed incrementally.
Building a Campaign for Financial Justice
A major outcome of the gathering was the development of a pan-African campaign strategy. Four thematic working groups laid the foundation for coordinated action targeting DFIs and private equity, national governments, multinational agribusinesses, and philanthropic actors like AGRA and the Gates Foundation. Their proposed interventions include divestment from harmful agricultural investments, legal reforms, public procurement from agroecological producers, and a moratorium on the expansion of GMOs and industrial seed systems.
Conclusion: Agroecology is Africa’s Future
This report captures not only a moment of resistance but a turning point in the struggle to reshape Africa’s food and farming systems. The Nairobi gathering laid the foundations for a continent-wide campaign to shift financial power—away from extractive, colonial models of agriculture and toward agroecological systems rooted in African values, community knowledge, and ecological justice.
AFSA will now take forward this momentum by publishing research and advocacy tools, convening regional and national dialogues, amplifying farmer and youth voices, and influencing policy at the continental level. Agroecology is not a technical fix—it is a political, cultural, and economic movement reclaiming African food systems from corporate and financial capture.
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