West African governments and development partners convened in Accra on Tuesday for the 2026 West Africa Rice Investment Roundtable, with Ghana’s Deputy Finance Minister calling for concrete investment pipelines to replace policy commitments that have failed to arrest a USD 4 billion annual regional rice import bill.
The roundtable was convened by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Commission, with support from the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank (AfDB), bringing together ECOWAS member state representatives, regional financial institutions, development partners and private investors.
Deputy Finance Minister Thomas Nyarko Ampem told the gathering that West Africa’s continued dependence on imported rice is draining scarce foreign exchange reserves while creating few of the jobs and industrial linkages that a competitive domestic rice sector could generate.
“West Africa does not need more declarations,” Nyarko Ampem said. “We need to create pipelines of bankable projects capable of crowding in long-term capital at scale.”
He called for what he termed “transformational capital” — long-term financing directed at irrigation systems, milling infrastructure, storage facilities and logistics networks that can link fragmented national markets into a coherent regional rice economy. He said the Mahama administration is advancing policies to de-risk agriculture, improve market coordination and build a more predictable environment for private investment, with rice among the priority value chains.
Vice President Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, who also addressed the roundtable, said scaling rice production into a commercially driven sector is critical to addressing the region’s growing demand and import burden, noting that Africa spends more than USD 50 billion annually on food imports, with rice accounting for a significant portion.
The roundtable comes as the AfDB has already committed resources to West African rice development. An USD 8.5 million programme launched in February 2026 is targeting improved seed production, sustainable farming practices and enhanced regional coordination across 14 countries, with a target of boosting yields from two to seven tonnes per hectare by 2029.
Nyarko Ampem stressed that financing alone will not close the gap. Greater coordination of trade systems, policy frameworks and standards across West African economies is equally necessary, he argued, if the region is to build a competitive rice industry rather than sustain fragmented national efforts.
