GCA, AfDB join forces to scale up access to climate-smart technologies - NaijaAgroNet

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The Global Center for Adaptation (GCA) and African Development Bank (AfDB) have advanced plans to scale up access to climate-smart digital technologies in Africa, reports NaijaAgroNet.

Senior Director for Africa at GCA, Anthony Nyong informed that they are looking at scaling up access to climate-smart digital technologies by the year 2025.

Ken Lohento joins 2021 AgriHack judges - NaijaAgroNet: ... Linking agrobiz, sustainable environs, people & technology

NaijaAgroNet:

The Digital Innovation Strategy Consultant with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Mr. Ken Lohento, has been named alongside Ebunoluwa Bolodeoku of Heifer International and six others as confirmed judges for the 2021 Pitch AgriHack, reports NaijaAgroNet.

Ken Lohento

Other members of the judge panel, NaijaAgroNet gathered include Elisee Kamanzi and William Matovu of Heifer International, Nixon Gecheo of AGRA, Barbra Musata of Corteva Agriscience, Grace Vuhya Obeda and Hafou Toure-Samb of African Development Bank.

AfDB commits 100% to renewable energy projects for Africa - NaijaAgroNet

NaijaAgroNet: 

The African Development Bank Group has recommitted to supporting renewable energy projects by 100 per cent on the continent, reports NaijaAgroNet.

AfDB in a refutal over alleged plans to provide financial support to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline Project, declared ‘renewable energy as the future” path for Africa. 

The group through its Acting Director of Communication and External Relations Department, Mrs. Nafissatou Diouf, said the bank is strongly committed to renewable energies, noting that for over a decade, the bank has played a leading role in crafting policies and delivering investments that promote sustainable development practices on the continent, including climate adaptation and resilience.

“The Bank is committed to facilitating the transition to low-carbon and climate-resilient development in African countries across all its operational priority areas,” she told NaijaAgroNet in a press statement.

AfDB maintained it did not have any plan to finance the East African Crude Oil Pipeline Project, declaring that the group is for “100% renewable projects and sustainable, low-emission agriculture and infrastructure.”

The Bank, she equally said, has prioritized investment in renewables and has not invested in any coal project in the past decade as it sees renewable energy as the future.

“Since the launch of the Bank’s Strategy for the New Deal on Energy in 2016, up to 2019 renewable energy projects constitute about 85% percent on average of the Bank’s power generation investments,” she said,

Maintaining that the Bank is working closely with African countries to realize their renewable energy potential and has developed dedicated programmes and instruments to achieve this goal.

Isaac Oyimah/Editor

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Women, excellent investment as finance leaders urge increased support - NaijaAgroNet

NaijaAgroNet: 

Leaders from multilateral development banks, financial institutions and the private sector called on peers to dispel myths about women being too “high risk” for financing and offer more financial services for women in business to close the gender finance gap, reports NaijaAgroNet.

“We know that women are a good bet. We know they pay back. We know they run excellent businesses – and yet they are not getting financed,” said Dr Jennifer Blanke, African Development Bank Vice President for Agriculture, Human and Social Development.

An important step is for multilateral development banks to offer credit guarantees to commercial banks to invest in women entrepreneurs, Blanke said.

“We know that if we provide those guarantees, then the banks are going to be lending to a lot more women, and they are going to discover that women are an excellent bet – and are an excellent investment.”

Blanke and other leaders were speaking at the “Using Innovative Financing Mechanisms to Accelerate Finance for Women in Business” plenary panel session at the Global Gender Summit on Tuesday.

The international gathering of gender champions from government, finance institutions, multilateral development banks, civil society and private industry, runs from 25 - 27 November in Kigali, Rwanda.

Panelists acknowledged that strides have been taken to bring gender equity to financing. However, according to World Economic Forum data, at current rates of progress it will take at least 200 years to close the global pay gap between men and women.

Asian Development Bank’s Gender Lead, Sakiko Tanaka, noted this 2019 Global Gender Summit has seen increased awareness of the need for women’s financial inclusion to achieve gender equality.

“There’s more money coming in for gender equality. However, there are still major gaps globally and as well as in each region,” said Tanaka, who also serves as chairperson of the multilateral development bank working group on gender.

Women face unique constraints such as poorer access to collateral and land, running smaller business compared to male entrepreneurs and blurred lines between women’s personal and professional finance spend.

Wendy Teleki, Head of the We-Fi (Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative) Secretariat and the panel moderator, led the six panelists in exploring how financial institutions and multilateral development banks are innovating to expand women’s access to finance. Aside from risk-sharing interventions like credit guarantees to lenders, panelists said increasing women’s financial literacy was also key to closing the gender gap.

“It’s not about corporate social responsibility or charity,” said panelist Barbara Rambousek, Director for Gender and Economic Inclusion at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. “It is about developing that business case and developing a proper set of financial and non-financial services.”

In Africa, 70% of women are excluded financially and there is a $42 billion financing gap between men and women. Yet panelist Solomon Lartey, Managing Director and CEO of Activa International Insurance Ghana sees opportunity, particularly in West Africa, home to what he says is the world’s highest rate of women entrepreneurs.

“To get women where they want to be, we had to walk with them. The first thing is training them [about financial services], then granting them access to legal assistance and to financial education – we have to do all those things,” Lartey said.

The panel also discussed innovations related to financial technology, alternative credit information, and online tools for financial services as a way to grow businesses.

In some developing regions of the world, women face challenges getting basic documents like a birth certificate, required by commercial bank applications.

Tesi Rusagara, the head of Kigali Innovation City, said the more services for documentation and financing tools are brought online, the more value will be created for women.

John Wilson, CEO of Equity Bank, added that it is important to not only use data and technology in financial services, but to also have a physical presence where clients are, to make a human connection.

Uj. N. Dominic/Editor

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AfDB, partners to lift 1 billion people out of hunger globally - NaijaAgroNet

NaijaAgroNet:

The African Development Bank called on global partners to join hands to lift one billion people worldwide out of hunger and said it was leading the way by investing US$24 billion in African agriculture over the next 10 years in the largest such effort ever, reports NaijaAgroNet.

“We are not winning the war against global hunger,” Bank President Akinwumi Adesina told an agriculture conference at Purdue University in Indianapolis on Tuesday, 25 September.

“We must not get carried away,” he added, referring to statistics showing a decline in the global population living on less than two dollars per day. In reality, the number of hungry people in the world had increased from 777 million in 2015 to 815 million in 2016, he said citing the latest World Food Security and Nutrition data.

Adesina told the audience that included researchers, implementing organizations, business leaders, policymakers and donors that simple technical and scientific methods were already making a whole difference to farm yields and income in Africa. While such technologies to deliver Africa’s green revolution exist, they are mostly just sitting on the shelves, he said.

“The release of water efficient maize varieties now allows farmers to harvest good yields in the face of moderate drought,” he noted. “Today, rice varieties exist that can give yields of 8 tonnes per ha. Cassava varieties exist with yields of up to 80 tonnes per ha. Heat tolerant and disease resistant livestock and technologies for ramping up aquaculture exist.”

Bank experts put current comparative yields at 1.5-2 tonnes per ha for rice and 10-15 tonnes per ha for cassava.

What was needed urgently was deployment of supportive policies to ensure technologies are cascaded down to millions of farmers. “All Africa needs to do is to harness the available technologies with the right policies and rapidly raise agricultural productivity and incomes for farmers and assure lower food prices for consumers.”

The Bank has launched its Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT), a $1 billion initiative to extend the use of farm technologies. TAAT is currently engaging seed companies, public and private entities, and financial institutions in 27 countries to make technology available to a total of 40 million African farmers.

Combining targeted subsidies for farmers with a market-based system for rapidly expanding access to financing for farmers and agricultural value chains is the fastest way to get many people out of poverty to a sustained pathway for economic growth, Adesina added.

The conference on “ Scaling Up Agricultural Technologies for Transformation” (http://bit.ly/2NK3XL5) marked Adesina’s fond return to his alma mater.

“It was here, as a graduate student, that I began the journey of searching for ways to get technologies into the hands of millions of farmers,” he said. Adesina was to go on to make a huge impact on the transformation of agriculture in Africa, including implementing game-changing policies in his years as Nigeria’s Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development before taking up his post at the Bank in September 2015.

Adesina said the situation in Sub-Saharan Africa needed particularly urgent intervention due to the ravages of climate change. The International Food Policy Research Institute estimates that Africa will add 38 million to its number of hungry people by 2050 as a result of climate change.  The Institute forecasts that Africa will experience major food shortages by 2020 and beyond, while malnutrition will be on the rise over the next 20 years.

The Bank’s ongoing initiatives had the objectives of growing income for farmers, stabilizing prices for staple crops, reducing losses and stimulating multiplier effects in local economies.  With its Staple Crop Processing Zones and other initiatives, the Bank is demonstrating how this can be done.

“The African Development Bank put feeding Africa as one of its topmost priorities when it launched its Feed Africa strategy (http://bit.ly/2Q7A04c) in 2015 and is investing $ 24 billion in agriculture for Africa over 10 years – the largest ever such effort,” the Bank President said. Across Africa, the Feed Africa Strategy (http://bit.ly/2Q9GnUv) is supporting the development of policies, markets, infrastructure and institutions that will ensure that agricultural value chains are well developed and that technologies reach several millions of farmers.

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AfDB, FAO sign deal to end hunger, malnutrition - NaijaAgroNet

NaijaAgroNet:

The African Development Bank (AfDB) and Food and AgricultureOrganisation (FAO) have signed deal aimed at catalysing agriculture sector investments in Africa to end hunger and malnutrition and increase prosperity throughout the continent, reports NaijaAgroNet.

The agreement, NaijaAgroNet gathered comprised that AfDB and FAO are committed to raise up to $100 million over five years, to support joint partnership activities.

The new alliance precisely seeks to enhance the quality and impact of investment in food security, nutrition, social protection, agriculture, forestry, fisheries and rural development.

AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina and FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva signed the agreement, which builds on a longstanding collaboration between their organizations, at the UN agency's Rome headquarters.

"FAO and the AfDB are deepening and broadening our partnership to assist African countries achieve the sustainable development goals. Leveraging investments in agriculture, including from the private sector, is key to lift millions of people from hunger and poverty in Africa and to ensure that enough food is produced and that enough rural jobs are created for the continent's growing population," said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva.

AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina said: "The signing of this supplementary agreement is a milestone moment in the relationship between the African Development Bank and FAO. It signals our joint commitment to accelerate the delivery of high quality programs and increased investment for public-private-partnerships in Africa's agriculture sector. This will help us achieve the vision of making agriculture a business, as enshrined in the Bank's Feed Africa strategy."

The Bank's Feed Africa strategy, launched in 2015, targets to invest $24 billion into African agriculture over a ten-year period. The aim is that of improving agricultural policies, markets, infrastructure and institutions to ensure that agricultural value chains are well developed and that improved technologies are made available to reach several millions farmers.

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AfDB cultivates savannah Africa in eight countries

NaijaAgroNet:

The President of the African Development Bank, Akinwumi Adesina, has said that the savannahs of Africa cover a mind-boggling 600 million hectares, of which 400 million hectares are cultivable, reports NaijaAgroNet.

But just 10% of this is cultivated, a mere 40 million hectares, Adesina said Wednesday, while speaking at a session titled “Transformation of the African Savannah Initiative” at the 2017 World Food Prize-Borlaug Dialogue.

According to the AfDB President, so huge is the potential of African savannahs that the World Bank called the Guinea savanna zone “one of the major underutilised resources in Africa.”

He noted that Africa’s savannahs were better than the savannahs of Brazil, a country notable for turning its savannahs into agricultural wealth, saying Africa’s soils were not acidic and therefore did not need liming which had to be done at massive scales in Brazil.

“The initiative will start by bringing approximately two million hectares of savannah in eight African countries — Ghana, Guinea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, and Mozambique under the cultivation of maize, soybean, and livestock production in optimum conditions,” he said.

The goal of which, Adesina informed NaijaAgroNet, is to double production in those eight countries.

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AfDB urges leaders to make agriculture attractive for young Africans

NaijaAgroNet:

The President of the African Development Bank (AfDB) Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, has urged African leaders to make agriculture attractive for the younger generation, reports NaijaAgroNet.

He was speaking on the occasion of the 2017 World Food Day, AfDB president highlighted how Africa’s food security depends on attracting young people to agriculture and agribusiness. The sector can potentially create wealth and employment for African youth, thereby stemming migration.

World Food Day, celebrated yearly on October 16, promotes worldwide awareness and action for those who suffer from hunger and the need to ensure food security and nutritious diets for all, which this year’s theme focused on the need to ‘Change the future of migration; Invest in food security and rural development’.

The AfDB’s ENABLE Youth programme, which grooming a crop of young agriculturists, is on course to make this happen.

Mahmud Johnson, 26, is the Founder of J-Palm Liberia which works to improve income for Liberia’s smallholder oil palm farmers by 50-80 per cent. He is also creating additional jobs for over 1,000 young people to work as sales representatives for his products.

“Despite the tremendous odds, we (African youth) are determined to maximize our abundant agricultural resources to create wealth, jobs, and socioeconomic opportunities in our countries and across the continent. We need our stakeholders to view us as serious partners in Africa’s transformation, and to work with us to expand our enterprises,” Mahmud said.

Mahmud and some of his employees have benefited from capacity building programs under the AfDB’s Empowering Novel Agri-Business-Led Employment for Youth initiative.

Like Mahmud, many African youth are passionate about staying back on the continent to create wealth and employment, if given the tools and opportunities to put their skills to use. Under the ENABLE Youth program, the Bank is working with the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) to develop a new generation of young commercial farmers and agribusiness entrepreneurs.

“Our goal is to develop 10,000 such young agricultural entrepreneurs per country in the next 10 years. In 2016, the Bank provided US $700 million to support this program in eight countries and we've got requests now from 33 countries,” said Adesina.

The Bank considers investment in agriculture as key to making Africa youths prosperous, thereby stemming the tide of migration.

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Food security: Gambia secures $9m loan from AfDB

NaijaAgroNet:

The Gambian government has signed a USD 9 million loan agreement with the African Development Bank (AfDB) Group, to finance an agriculture value chains project, reports NaijaAgroNet.

The acting Vice-President, Sector Operations, AfDB, Kapil Kapoor, who signed the agreement for the bank, said that project which involves the production, processing and storage of or rice and livestock, will improve food security and create jobs.

He also said that the project is aligned with the bank’s High-5 priorities, especially the Feed Africa component, stressing that the government would implement the project as quickly as possible in line with the bank's new accelerated projects and programmes delivery approach.

In response, the Gambian Finance and Economic Affairs Minister, Abdou Kolley, who signed the agreement for his country, thanked the bank for the support, and said the project will go a long way toward the realization of his county's food self-sufficiency goal and promised that the government would work hard to reduce bottlenecks which cause delays in the projects implementation.

The Agriculture Value Chains Development Project (AVCDP) which was approved in March 2016, seeks to increase, on a sustainable basis, the income of rural producers, entrepreneurs engaged in the production, processing, storage and marketing of rice and livestock. It will also create shared wealth and jobs.

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Access to food, a fundamental right says Adeshina

NaijaAgroNet:

The president of African Development Bank (AfDB), Dr Akinwumi Adesina has stated that access to food in quantity and quality is a fundamental human right, NaijaAgroNet reports.

He emphasised the importance of agriculture and food security to the growth and development of Africa. “People eat food. Access to food in quantity and quality is a fundamental human right. Just few weeks ago at the United Nations General Assembly, the world took a bold decision to approve the Sustainable Development Goals. In my meeting with the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, he told me: ‘The SDGs must succeed in Africa. If they do not succeed there, they cannot be said to have succeeded’.

Adeshina, NaijaAgroNet  gathered, was speaking at a high level conference on agricultural transformation themed ‘Feeding Africa.’ He said nothing is more important than food, adding that while Africa had risen on the back of new discoveries of oil and gas fields, in reality, no one eats oil or gas.

“The other side of the trajectory, which we must face, is that the growth process is highly unequal. Africa has today, one of the highest inequalities in the world. Over 400 million live on less than one dollar per day.

“While poverty rates have fallen in Africa, the absolute number of the poor has increased, and Africa is the only region where the absolute number of the poor increased in the world,” he said.
He maintained that Africa must rise up and unlock its full agricultural potential, adding that with all its bright sunshine, abundant water resources and cheap labour, Africa should be a global powerhouse in food and agriculture, NaijaAgroNet learnt.

“Africa cannot eat potential and there is no market for selling potential. In Nigeria, we unlocked that potential when I was minister of agriculture. This convinces me that agricultural transformation can occur in a very short period of time. The Agricultural Transformation Agenda which implemented wide-ranging reforms with sharp focus on the private sector-led input delivery systems, value chain development and financing systems, led to an increase of 21 million metric tonnes in food production within three years. The food import bill in the country fell from an all-time high of $11 billion, about N2.18 trillion in 2009 to $3.2 billion, about N636. 96 billion by 2014,” he added.

Cyriacus Nnaji with additional report from Leadership/GEE

 
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AfDB advocates ‘polluter pays’ principle

NaijaAgroNet:

The President, African Development Bank (AfDB), Akinwumi Adesina, has affirmed the bank’s readiness to champion the implementation of the ‘polluter pays’ principle, reports NaijaAgroNet.

The principle is an environmental law enacted to make the party responsible for producing pollution to pay for the damage done to the natural environment. Adesina added that the bank will work with member countries and partners to support governance reforms, continental risk transfer and risk-sharing schemes. In addition, they will build institutions that will support greater social and economic resilience in the face of climate change.

The AfDB president was addressing a delegation of ministers representing more than 40 nations in Paris to push for a ‘New Deal on Energy in Africa’ to solve Africa’s energy crisis.

Adesina, NaijaAgroNet gathered, also called for strong political will, sharply focused partnerships and ambitious financing programmes to address climate and its impact on the millions of people whose livelihoods are under threat.

“We need to support initiatives that address risks associated with climate change, and build disaster-response capacity and recovery programmes for those who are most affected.
“This includes building their assets, providing catastrophic bonds, weather index insurance schemes, and crop/livestock insurance for farmers and rural populations, he stated.”

The AfDB president also held bilateral talks with Laurent Fabius and Helene Le Gal, Adviser to the President of France, and senior officials of the Agence Française de Développement to discuss strategic partnerships between the Bank and France, NajiaAgroNet learnt.

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Africa must close gap between gender

NaijaAgroNet

The Africa Development Bank (AfDB), Special Envoy on Gender, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, has said that the huge gap in wages and agricultural yields between men and women must be closed if Africa is to achieve full economic transformation, reports NaijaAgroNet.

"African women feed the continent and they can feed the world, too. But we must close the wide gap in wages and agricultural yields between men and women if Africa is to achieve full economic transformation," she disclosed.

Information obtained from the bank’s website revealed that the office of the Special Envoy on Gender (SEOG) and the Department for Agriculture and Agro-industry (OSAN) of the African Development Bank (AfDB),  launched a new report called "Economic Empowerment of African Women through Equitable Participation in Agricultural Value Chains"in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. The event which gathered high-level participants, including stakeholders from both the private and public sectors from the countries and sectors examined in the report, looked at cocoa, coffee, cotton and cassava sectors in Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and Nigeria, respectively.

"This report prepares the ground to empower women, to take a leading role in the business of farming and agricultural value chains, regionally and globally," said the immediate past President of the African Development Bank, Donald Kaberuka.

Agriculture in Africa, NaijaAgroNet gathered, is poised to remain one of the most important economic sectors, accounting for around 25 per cent of the continent's GDP. Over 60 per cent of its citizens rely on agriculture for some form of income. To transform the sector, the economic empowerment of women through boosting their productivity and raising their participation in commercial and higher value-add activities in agriculture is central.

In some countries, such as Rwanda, Malawi and Burkina Faso, over 90 per cent of economically active women are involved in agriculture, NaijaAgroNet learnt.

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