By the Witness Radio team.
Brazzaville: As the African Development Bank’s 2026 Annual Meetings drew to a close in Brazzaville on this Friday, policymakers, finance ministers, and development leaders renewed their demand for stronger economic reforms, expanded investment mobilization, and new approaches to financing Africa’s development ambitions in an increasingly fragmented global economy.
Held under the theme “Mobilizing Africa’s Development Financing at Scale in a Fragmented World,” the meetings brought together representatives from the Bank’s 81-member countries to debate debt pressures, climate financing, regional integration, private investment, and the future of Africa’s economic transformation. Discussions throughout the week stressed the urgency of strengthening domestic resource mobilization while attracting larger pools of development finance to address infrastructure gaps, food insecurity, and climate vulnerability.
The launch of the African Development Bank’s African Economic Outlook 2026 during the meeting, which started on Monday, the 25th, and ends today, the 29th of May 2026, reinforced both optimism and caution. While the report projected stronger continental growth prospects, it warned that rising debt burdens, shrinking concessional aid, and intensifying climate shocks continue to constrain African economies.
As discussions in Brazzaville focused on scaling development finance, food sovereignty advocates highlight that strengthening local food systems and supporting smallholder farmers are essential for inclusive growth and community resilience, and should be a priority for the African Development Bank.
The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) has challenged the direction and accountability of the Bank’s agricultural financing, arguing that a significant share of development funding continues to favor industrial agribusiness approaches. At the same time, farmer-led food systems receive limited support.
AFSA’s review of African Development Bank agricultural financing between 2019 and 2025 found that Bank investments remain heavily concentrated in agro-industrial corridors, fertilizer and hybrid seed systems, mechanization, irrigation expansion, industrial processing, and corporate value chains.
Examining 20 Bank-funded agricultural projects, researchers concluded that none demonstrated strong alignment with agroecological principles such as crop diversification, soil health, ecological resilience, or community-led practices, highlighting a significant gap in sustainable practices and the need for more holistic approaches.
The findings also raise questions about the Bank’s climate financing claims. Although nearly half of its agricultural lending is classified as climate finance, researchers argue that many projects continue to reproduce input-intensive Green Revolution approaches that rely heavily on external seeds, fertilizers, and monoculture production systems.
“The real question is what this finance does once it reaches the ground. It is overwhelmingly funding an industrial model that sidelines smallholders and calls high-input monocultures ‘climate-smart.’ Africa’s farmers are not asking the Bank to stop investing — they are asking it to invest in systems that truly support local food sovereignty,” Said the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa’s General Coordinator, Million Belay Ali.
The criticism by the agricultural organizations extends beyond financing patterns into questions of land and agricultural expansion. Research by the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape disputes a core assumption underpinning the Bank’s Feed Africa agenda, “the idea that the African continent contains vast amounts of idle land available for large-scale agricultural development”.
Researchers highlight that smallholder farmers manage roughly 80 percent of Africa’s farmland and produce most of the food consumed across sub-Saharan Africa, underscoring their vital role and deserving of stronger support from the continental bank.
AFSA consultant Michael Ferally said the Bank’s agricultural investments increasingly link farmers to commercial value chains but often fail to strengthen local food systems or ecological resilience.
“Most of the agriculture, it is financing still follows an industrial model,” Ferally said in an interview with Witness Radio. “It heavily supports fertilizers, hybrid seeds, mechanization, irrigation, and large-scale processing infrastructure. In many cases, the aim is to integrate farmers into commercial value chains rather than strengthen local food systems.”
He added that this model risks reshaping food systems around export-oriented agribusiness and supermarket supply chains, in which small-scale farmers are treated primarily as suppliers rather than as central actors in food system design.
According to Ferally, an assessment of 20 Bank-supported projects found weak alignment with agroecological principles, with none scoring highly on ecological farming approaches. He said climate-smart agriculture programs, while widely promoted, often fail to deliver meaningful ecological resilience.
“Nearly half of agricultural investments are labeled as climate-related, but only a small share actually supports soil regeneration, biodiversity, or diversified farming systems. Without those elements, climate finance risks becoming a label rather than a meaningful transformation of agricultural practice,” He explained, emphasizing the need for genuine ecological outcomes in climate-related investments.
AFSA says these findings reinforce concerns that current investment models risk reshaping land-use systems in ways that could marginalize smallholder farmers, particularly when industrial value chains and certified seed systems are promoted at scale.
The organization is calling for the establishment of an agroecology transition financing window within the Bank’s agricultural portfolio, offering a promising pathway to support smallholder farmers, promote ecological resilience, and align investments with sustainable, locally rooted food systems, inspiring confidence among advocates and policymakers.
It argues that sufficient resources already exist within current agricultural finance flows to support a transition toward more ecologically sustainable and locally rooted food systems, if priorities are adjusted.
