The African Development Bank (AfDB) has urged West Africa to move from planning to action on rice, warning that a $3.5 billion annual import bill is draining the region’s foreign reserves.
Richard Kwaku Ofori-Mante, the bank’s Director of Agricultural Finance and Rural Development, told the West Africa Rice Investment Roundtable in Accra that the region imports nearly 12 million metric tons of rice a year despite holding ample farmland, growing markets and a young workforce. He said the land and demand exist; the test now is whether the region can deliver at scale.
The roundtable, hosted by the Government of Ghana, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the World Bank Group, gathered governments, lenders and private investors to raise financing for rice plans. It follows ECOWAS leaders’ ratification of a Regional Rice Roadmap covering 2025 to 2035, which targets rice self sufficiency by 2035.
At the centre of the bank’s plan is the Regional Resilient Rice Value Chains Development Program in West Africa, known as REWARD, a $680 million effort spanning all 15 ECOWAS states. Ofori-Mante said it aims to overhaul rice value chains from irrigation and seeds to processing and markets, and to reach more than one million farmers.
He said the AfDB board had approved close to $136 million for early operations, including grants to ECOWAS and AfricaRice and country projects in The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Côte d’Ivoire. Ghana, named a strategic anchor country, received an $18.6 million grant from the African Development Fund last week, he added, and is lined up for further financing under the bank’s 2026 to 2027 lending program.
“It is about transformation at scale,” Ofori-Mante said of REWARD.
He identified the main constraints as costly long term finance, weak irrigation and limited processing capacity rather than poor demand. To ease lending, the bank is advancing a proposed $200 million facility to share risk on agricultural input supply.
Ofori-Mante set out five priorities: larger irrigation systems, stronger mechanisation, investment in processing, blended finance to draw in private capital, and deeper regional market integration.
