By Aggie Asiimwe Konde
The world feels increasingly unsettled. Geopolitical tensions, shifting trade routes, tightening development financing and persistent food security anxiety have become standard features of policy conversations about Africa’s future. Yet a visit to a tomato field forty kilometres outside the city recently left me questioning whether we are looking for Africa’s prosperity story in the right places.
A year ago, I acquired eight hectares of land outside a city centre. The motivation was not agricultural. Like many urban professionals, I viewed land primarily as a wealth preservation tool: an asset that appreciates over time and diversifies a portfolio.
That thinking changed when I met my neighbour, Willy Kibuuka. By the time I arrived at his field, the second truck was already being loaded. The first had departed earlier in the day and there was clearly enough crop standing to fill a third. Each crate was selling for approximately $135. Across an estimated sixty crates, Willy had already generated close to $8,100 from a season still in progress.
What stopped me was not the money. It was the method. No sophisticated machinery, no visible technical infrastructure, and yet here was a young farmer moving product at scale, capturing value before it could be lost. Post-harvest losses, one of Africa’s most persistent agricultural challenges, had not yet become his story.
I asked Willy what the closure of the Strait of Hormuz meant to him. He dismissed it almost immediately. Then I asked whether input prices had increased. He acknowledged they had, but explained that price movements were simply part of doing business and that survival came down to knowing “when to harvest and how to price the crop.”
That answer stayed with me. While many of us in boardrooms and urban centres remain absorbed by geopolitical headlines, Willy was focused entirely on timing, markets and execution. His prosperity depended not on global narratives but on entrepreneurial decisions made at field level.
Standing there, I was forced into an uncomfortable comparison. I had more land, more education, more networks and greater access to capital. Yet he had activated an asset while I had merely preserved one. Behavioural science refers to this as the intention-action gap: the distance between what people know and what they actually do.
Africa holds nearly 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, yet food insecurity and unrealised agricultural potential remain defining themes of policy discussions about the continent. Seen through this lens, that statistic may not represent unused land alone. It may represent one of the largest intention-action gaps in economic development history.
Subsequent conversations with friends surfaced similar stories: an onion farmer near Nairobi who reportedly failed twice before generating close to $30,000 monthly from twelve acres; export opportunities in banana puree pointing to entirely different value chains. These are not really stories about specific crops. They are stories about activation.
For those of us with land sitting dormant and investment principles well understood but not applied, the question becomes urgent: what separates analysis from action?
Africa’s prosperity story is already growing. Perhaps the work now is not to discover it, but to recognise it, tell it and choose to participate in building it.
Aggie Asiimwe Konde is Communications, External Engagements and Advocacy Director at AGRA, an African-led institution focused on scaling agricultural innovations for smallholder farmers.
