A pan-African civil society platform has confronted the African Development Bank (AfDB) at its 2026 Annual Meetings with research showing that billions in agricultural finance are flowing past the smallholder farmers who actually feed the continent, while the foundational premise of the Bank’s flagship food strategy is built on a myth.
The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), active across 50 African countries and representing some 200 million people, published the challenge this week as governors and delegates gathered at the Kintélé International Conference Centre near Brazzaville under the theme “Mobilising Africa’s Development Financing at Scale.” The meetings run from 25 to 29 May 2026.
Three studies anchor AFSA’s case. Two analyse AfDB agricultural lending from 2019 to 2025 and assess the 40 Dakar 2 “Feed Africa” country compacts. The third, produced by the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, goes to the root of the problem by targeting the ideological premise on which Feed Africa rests.
PLAAS researchers found the Bank’s promotion of Africa as a continent holding vast idle or underutilised land available for large-scale agriculture to be empirically false and historically loaded with colonial-era “empty land” thinking. Much of the land categorised as available already serves grazing, gathering, shifting cultivation and ecological functions, carrying customary claims that formal analysis routinely ignores. Smallholders manage approximately 80 percent of Africa’s farmland and supply up to 80 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s food supply.
The portfolio analysis delivers a parallel verdict on money flows. Both sovereign lending and a rapidly expanding private-sector window concentrate on fertilisers, hybrid seeds, mechanisation and industrial processing. Support for diversified, farmer-led or agroecological systems remains marginal across the board. Nearly half of agricultural project approvals carry climate finance labels, yet most replicate Green Revolution input packages rather than ecosystem-based farming approaches. Of 20 projects assessed, none reached high agroecological alignment. Flagship programmes including agro-industrial processing zones scored at the lowest end.
“The real question is what this finance does once it reaches the ground,” said Million Belay Ali, general coordinator of AFSA.
The Dakar 2 compacts carry additional risks for those at the end of the supply chain. AFSA found the compacts implicate more than 11 million smallholders in industrial contract farming arrangements, frequently with limited control over their land, crops or prices. The compacts also advance land acquisition and certified seed systems that researchers warn could displace the farmer-managed seed varieties most rural households depend on. Transparency remains a persistent problem: lending routed through intermediary banks and funds makes public money difficult to trace, and communities report consultation without genuine influence over outcomes.
AFSA is not calling for the Bank to abandon agricultural investment. Its demands focus on recalibration. The group urges AfDB governors to establish a dedicated Agroecology Transition Window within Feed Africa, require ecological performance indicators for all agricultural projects, mandate the publication of sub-loan recipients and community beneficiaries, protect customary land rights through free and informed consent processes, and ring-fence local food markets from displacement by industrial value chains.
AFSA argues that the resources for this shift already exist within the Bank’s current agricultural portfolio. Redirecting a portion of existing financing toward agroecological systems, local markets and community-led innovation could achieve scale without waiting for new capital. The question before the Bank’s governors this week, the group says, is not how much to mobilise but which Africa they choose to invest in.
The 2026 AfDB Annual Meetings bring together delegates from the Bank’s 81 member countries, with sessions continuing through Friday 29 May.
