In this episode of Devpolicy Talks, Robin Davies interviews Dr Agnes Kalibata, President of AGRA (the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) and former UN Special Envoy for the Food Systems Summit. They discuss AGRA's role in transforming African agriculture, the challenges of climate change, and innovative approaches to supporting smallholder farmers across the continent.
Robin Davies speaks with Dr Agnes Kalibata, who has led the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa for the past decade and previously served as Rwanda's Minister of Agriculture, in which role she helped achieve remarkable reductions in poverty and malnutrition.
In this discussion, Kalibata explains AGRA's evolution as a bridge between research organisations, funders and rural communities. She emphasises the importance of developing locally-appropriate solutions rather than attempting to replicate European (or Australian) agricultural models. AGRA's focus on building sustainable ecosystems through small-scale enterprises worth $100,000-$200,000 has been crucial in transforming rural communities.
Kalibata discusses how AGRA works across 15 countries, particularly in Eastern and Southern Africa, to improve access to improved seeds, fertilisers and agricultural technologies. She highlights the organisation's success in helping governments design nationwide programs that can reach millions of farmers simultaneously. The interview explores the significant challenges posed by climate change, which she identifies as becoming "real" for African agriculture from 2015, and the need to adapt farming practices accordingly.
Looking ahead to COP31 — potentially hosted by Australian together with the Pacific island countries — Kalibata emphasises the critical importance of addressing climate change impacts on African agriculture and calls for leadership in supporting those most affected by climate challenges.
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"We spent too much time trying to emulate the wrong models, thinking African agriculture would be the same as Australian or European agriculture. The moment we started thinking African agriculture needs to look different, we started developing solutions at the right scale - small village shops, hired tractor services, hired irrigation equipment. We brought everything to the scale of the people in these rural areas. That's when we started delivering real value." [Agnes Kalibata]
Welcome to Devpolicy Talks, the podcast of the Development Policy Centre at the Australian National University. I'm Robin Davies. This is our first episode for 2025, and we’ll keep them coming every fortnight through the year. Today I'm speaking with Dr Agnes Kalibata, who is the President of AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.
Dr Kalibata has led AGRA for the past decade, working to transform African agriculture by supporting smallholder farmers across the continent. Before joining AGRA, she served as Rwanda's Minister of Agriculture, where she helped achieve remarkable reductions in poverty and malnutrition. More recently, she served as the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for the 2021 Food Systems Summit.
In our conversation, we discuss AGRA's evolution and its role in building sustainable agricultural systems in Africa, the growing challenges of climate change, and the innovative approaches needed to support millions of smallholder farmers. We also explore what Australia can contribute as it pursues its joint bid with Pacific nations to host COP31 in 2026.
Agnes Kalibata [0:14]
Good morning. My name is Agnes Kalibata. I'm the president of AGRA and the former UN Special Envoy for the Food Systems Summit.
Robin Davies [0:26]
Thank you, Agnes. Could you just tell us a little bit about the mandate of AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa?
Agnes Kalibata [0:35]
AGRA is an institution that is based in Africa. We've really reconfigured our mission to be that African institution that works with governments and helps them understand how the agricultural sector works. The agricultural sector is fundamentally science-based. Let me start over.
AGRA was founded to support African farmers, to ensure that African farmers can have access to technologies, improved seeds, access to fertilisers, ways of improving their ability to be productive in the agricultural sector, improve labour productivity and increase general output from agriculture.
This was because it was widely thought that agriculture's lack of productivity was due to farmers not having access to seeds, or choices of seeds like farmers have in the rest of the world. Very few African farmers at the time AGRA was established had access to hybrid seed. Very few seed companies existed to take this technology to farmers. Very few companies could afford to bring fertilisers into the continent and distribute them to farmers.
So AGRA's primary focus was on building systems to deliver these technologies to farmers. For example, we worked with local research institutes to build the capacities of scientists so they can improve locally available varieties against disease and pests, enabling farmers to grow them and get better yields. We also went further and started an institution to help import fertilisers into the continent. AFAP [African Fertilizer and Agribusiness Partnership], which is an institution that supports farmers and businesses to import fertilisers, was actually started by AGRA.
In each case, whichever way you look at it, AGRA was put in place to help build systems that can help farmers access yield-improving technologies across the African continent. We are now in 15 countries. We support private sector, we support governments, and the whole purpose is to ensure that farmers can access technologies and increase their yields.
Robin Davies [3:28]
How does AGRA relate to the CGIAR network of research organisations, what used to be called the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research?
Agnes Kalibata [3:40]
The CGIAR is really the backbone of what we do. AGRA doesn't do any primary research, and we believe very much in the power of the seed, especially the improved seed, to increase productivity for farmers. This is particularly important because where these farmers live, the varieties they are working with are either challenged by pests – groundnuts, beans, maize, all these commodities exist – and if they are not being challenged by pests, they are challenged by low yields.
The beauty of science and improved breeding, as it comes from the CGIAR, is that it can help farmers deal with these problems because crops are improved to handle these challenges. The CGIAR does that research and AGRA builds on that research capacity to take improved crops to farmers. We focus a lot on building the system that delivers what the CGIAR does to farmers.
We invest in seed companies – I'm talking about local SMEs, local village shops that wouldn't usually exist – to make sure that they exist. This is very critical because we don't see our job as delivering seeds to farmers. We see our job as building the ecosystem that delivers seeds and fertilisers to farmers. The ecosystem is what needs to be in place – the local private seed businesses, the local private fertiliser companies, really very small businesses, but very critical to how the rural ecosystem functions.
Robin Davies [5:34]
So it sounds like AGRA is sort of a bridge between the research organisations and African agriculture ministries in individual countries, is that a reasonable summary?
Agnes Kalibata [5:43]
I would look at it as AGRA being a bridge between rural communities and many people – rural communities and the research ecosystem, rural communities and the funding ecosystem. We are funding and supporting those businesses using philanthropic resources that would otherwise find it very difficult to reach the ground if we didn't have an institution with the capability to turn this support into retail grants and oversee how these grants get to work and create an ecosystem in the village.
So we are a bridge for our funders. We are a bridge for the knowledge and science that comes from CGIAR, but we are also a bridge for the local entities, which are the local SMEs, and we create a bridge for the governments which need to work and create the policy system that will help all these things work. There's no amount of creating businesses that will work if the policy ecosystem isn't working. So we work on both ends – work with governments to ensure that they are creating the ecosystem and building their own knowledge, and work with private sector to ensure that they're building their capacity to deliver. Again, private sector here means local SMEs – some of the biggest are probably worth $100,000-$200,000. These are not big businesses, but they're every bit as critical as you can think of any business in local rural ecosystems.
Robin Davies [7:23]
Of course, you are a former agriculture minister from Rwanda. How does AGRA work with the official sector, with agriculture ministries across Africa?
Agnes Kalibata [7:38]
The way I see AGRA's work when it comes to governments and supporting governments – look at it as that institution that tries to understand why governments don't deliver, both from a function of lack of capacity to a function of lack of order, if you might call it that. Institutions really have to have both – they have to have the capacity, they have to have the resources, and they have to have the strategies.
We work on all those fronts. We work on supporting them to acquire resources. We work on supporting them to acquire skills and strengthen the skills of ministry staff, and we work with governments to ensure they understand that in areas like seed systems or fertilisers, the science behind it is very critical. To deliver this, you actually have to set systems to work all the way from tracking breeding to tracking seeds within businesses and the business ecosystem, and to ensuring that farmers have received seeds that can cause a change in their lives. You want to know, until a farmer harvests, that the seed they got was the right seed.
To create that ecosystem, you need a system that works. We have just set up an institution called Centre for Excellence in Seed Systems to help governments walk through that journey – from the CGIAR with good seed being produced in breeding, all the way to building local seed companies, to setting up local regulatory environments and policies, and to ensuring there is a local delivery system at the farm level through small businesses in villages. That whole thing needs to work, and it can only work because governments understand what needs to be done and they're prepared to be the backbone without being the primary deliverer.
You want them to be the backbone to provide the support ecosystem in which local private sector can thrive and be able to deliver these things to farmers. That's really what we do.
Robin Davies [10:00]
Of course, you know Africa comprises more than 50 countries. What are your geographic priorities across Africa? Are there certain regions where you concentrate your effort?
Agnes Kalibata [10:18]
Today, we work across 15 countries in Africa. We do work a lot in Eastern and Southern Africa. We do have a few countries in West Africa. We do work with the African Union and all the regions, the RECs [Regional Economic Communities], across the continent.
Our vision is we try not to scatter. We do as much as we can in the countries we are in. We really try to set an example of what is possible. Sometimes we rationally go with countries where we know we are going to get the success we are looking for by recognising that some countries are more ready and really willing to get the ecosystems going.
We do that and try to find countries that are prepared to move things forward and work with them. With that, we are able to demonstrate what happens when political will and leadership meets scientific capacity, which is what we bring in. We bring in scientific capacity on how science can deliver for the agricultural sector, and how the agriculture sector depends so much on science to be able to deliver – but it won't happen without the right political environment. And for the right political environment to happen, you need leadership and you need political will.
When we have this whole mix working together, we really get good results, and that's because such governments are willing to put in money, they are willing to support programs that can deliver value for farmers, and they are willing to reform policies. We are in 15 countries. We would love to be in all the countries that need AGRA's support. We are limited by the amount of resources we have, and as we get more resources, then we increase our ability to be in more countries.
Robin Davies [12:23]
Then a similar question about, I guess, your thematic priorities – again, you've got to set priorities. What kind of innovations, technologies, approaches are you focused on primarily?
Agnes Kalibata [12:39]
For the longest time, we've put a lot of emphasis on the role and value of seed. There are maybe two reasons that I see that are very critical. One from my own experience: when a farmer uses improved seed and an improved variety of maize, for example, and is able to get three tonnes in an area where they were getting one tonne, or is able to get five tonnes when they combine the use of good seed and fertiliser in an area where they're getting half a tonne – for that farmer, it's night and day.
It changes how they think about themselves. It changes how they think about food security, while it also changes the economics of their farm, because it means that they only need half a tonne to feed their family, then the other 4.5 tonnes they sell to have income. And that's really the basis of what we do: how do you help a farmer move from subsistence farming to thriving as a business? Because this is what they do – they do this as a business – by giving them the means they need.
The means is the improved seed, the means is that fertiliser that they need to make a difference in the productivity of the crop they're using. The means is, in some cases, the ability to access irrigation, the ability to access financial instruments that can help them improve their farms. So the needs keep growing. But the real beauty is the farmer can grow with it. The farmer can start with the very basics, and we focus – AGRA has focused a lot on ensuring and providing for the very basics.
The very basics are the science of the seed, the sales of the fertilisers, and the extension system they need to get things to happen. Again, the reason an institution like AGRA becomes necessary is because we don't see governments significantly investing in these areas. They have lots of investments to do, but definitely not investing in the agriculture sectors as they should.
So this provides an opportunity and a business case for a government that is looking to do things differently, or a minister of agriculture that is looking to convince the minister of finance that this is a sector that is investable. A minister of finance is looking at probably 15 other sectors. Why should they spend their important dollar in the agricultural sector?
I always say it's important to spend it in the agricultural sector because you're feeding people, but also you're improving your strengthening the income capability of people. That's how you raise per capita income in your communities, but that's also how you strengthen your GDP. If you give a minister of finance the ability to look at it from that perspective, it really changes how they think about their spending.
But for that to work, it has to happen at scale. You can't do it with a few farmers and expect that your country is going to change, your per capita base is going to change, your GDP is going to change. This only happens if capacities like we bring as AGRA are combined and taken to scale by governments.
One of the things we do is help governments design nationwide programs that can be implemented at scale and reach millions of people at the same time. We call those flagships. If we can help a government design a program to reach 3-4-5 million people, then you know you're going to impact how people in the agricultural sector live. We do this sometimes with governments, where we sit with them and design these programs to roll out a major campaign across the country, or a major program across the country that will take seeds and fertilisers to millions of people at the same time.
When that happens, change is real. It's palpable. You can feel it. That's what we did in Rwanda. You could actually feel that farmers who were receiving seeds and fertilisers were changing their lives. And because this was happening at scale, the country was changing. We were able to reduce poverty by 12% in a period of five years. We were able to reduce malnutrition by 50% in a period of five years, mostly because these things are happening at scale. Farmers are getting access at scale.
Robin Davies [17:30]
I'd like to ask a broader question about agriculture and food security in Africa. There are a lot of things going on, of course – the impact of climate change, increasing investment in agricultural land from foreign sources, including China, the increasing commercialisation of agriculture, which you've talked about a bit at the small scale level. What's the sort of collective impact of all of those dynamics? Is the food security outlook improving overall or going the other way?
Agnes Kalibata [18:11]
Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of some of the achievements that are happening in the sector if you look at it from a challenge perspective. Some of the major milestones I can point to are that productivity overall has increased on the African continent, production overall has increased on the African continent, and millions of SMEs exist on the African continent that move millions of tonnes of food around. The African SMEs move 300 million metric tonnes of food between cities and rural areas. So things are moving and improvements are happening.
Of course, there are challenges we have to look at. The scale at which it's happening is not catching up with the scale at which we continue to increase our population. Our population growth is still happening a little bit faster than some of these improvements we'd like to see. So that's a challenge we need to manage sooner than later.
The other thing that is definitely working in the opposite direction is climate change that is really undermining all the efforts we've put in. In 2015, because I was working in the agricultural sector – I had just joined AGRA – I always remember the excitement I had, having had such a successful engagement in Rwanda, and thinking about how Rwanda is one of those difficult ecosystems to get agriculture moving. And I thought, with the rest of Africa and all the capacity we have on this continent, we are going to do so much more.
But that's also the year that climate change became real and you just start working against the cliff. From there on, droughts and floods start becoming a problem, and hunger starts increasing as a result of what's happening from a climate perspective. Of course, Africa continues to have a number of conflicts that also continue to increase hunger.
But I would say what I'm really proud of is that whatever challenges we have, it's not because we don't know it, and it's not because we don't have access. We have access to how we can improve our lives in terms of knowledge and technologies – it's increasingly becoming available in every village. We have the models we need to be able to deliver change in nearly every rural village. We just need to do it at scale, and we just need to find ways of fixing climate change so that when farmers try to do this, they don't lose everything they've been working for.
The farmers' base in Africa is pretty small, and that puts them in a very vulnerable situation. So any small challenge really throws them off balance. That's really the biggest problem – you're dealing with smallholder farmers with a small income base, with a small capital base, and they are highly vulnerable to shocks and stresses, and yet shocks and stresses are becoming the norm.
If we can find ways of fixing that, then we can actually start seeing the improvements we are looking for, because we've actually been looking at models that can deliver real value. I think we spent too much time trying to emulate the wrong models, trying to think that African agriculture is going to be the same as Australian agriculture or European agriculture. That was wasted time, if you're asking me. But the moment we started thinking that African agriculture needs to look different, then we started coming up with small village shops, hired tractor services as opposed to owning a tractor, hired irrigation equipment as opposed to needing to own all this equipment. We brought everything to the scale of the people in these rural areas.
Then we started delivering value. I remember the first time I tried to get fertilisers in my country. I was told the biggest challenge we had is we couldn't get a shipload. And if we couldn't get a shipload, we couldn't move fertilisers from any country towards my country, just because we don't have that type of private sector to get a shipload of fertilisers to the country. The question was, at that starting level, I didn't even know whether I needed a shipload. I just needed enough to get the tests going so that people can appreciate why I need a shipload.
So being able to bring things to scale by country, by farmers, by business, and trying to make sure that we get businesses in the agriculture ecosystem that are suitable for rural villages, rather than have big multinationals as the way we must do business – that was very critical for the African continent. But again, this is all beginning to happen. This is all beginning to deliver. And the challenge is climate change, but we've figured out those models in ways that can deliver for farmers, and that's something that I feel AGRA has contributed a lot to, and something that I'm extremely proud of.
Robin Davies [23:52]
Your visit to Australia is being hosted by the Crawford Fund and CSIRO. You've just said, of course, Australian models of agriculture are not necessarily transferable to Africa, but on the other hand, I assume certain technologies and products are useful. So what have you been discussing during your visit here in terms of what Australia has to offer?
Agnes Kalibata [24:20]
When I say not transferable, I was talking about scale. We're looking at big – I mean, your farmers here are huge, and their scale of tractor is going to be 250 kilowatts or horsepower. That type of scale is not what we are looking for. What we are looking for is the knowledge. What we are looking for is the ability to package knowledge in ways that can be delivered for the African farmer.
The knowledge is the same. The ability to deal with pests is needed across the board, the ability to deal with diseases. And the solutions, the improved varieties, all these things are the same – the post-harvest management, all these things are the same. The challenge I put back to you all is, how do we package it for smallholder farmers? How do we not look at the scale that we are delivering it here, and find ways of packaging it if you're in partnership with institutions in Africa, or working with Africa? Then we need to think about scale and bring it to local scale and bring it to smallholder scale.
That's why a partnership with an institution like AGRA, that has been trying to understand how to work with smallholder farmers and how to package solutions for smallholder farmers, becomes important. Here, there's a lot that we can learn from Australia in terms of what you've done very well in terms of technologies you've already moved forward with. And the partnership we build then is how we bring that to scale that can work for African farmers.
We've been working a lot on that, and we can definitely share that knowledge. I know that Australia also works in other places besides the African continent and has partnerships with the Pacific and other places where there are smallholder farmers. That's also knowledge that can work for you. So the exchange of knowledge and information around how to make farming work on small scale is something that is critical. How to make technology deliver value for farmers is something that is critical. It's already working here, and there's a lot that Africa can learn from that.
Robin Davies [26:29]
Do you see some specific opportunities for Australia to support certain innovations or approaches in Africa?
Agnes Kalibata [26:38]
There are quite a number of approaches that are extremely useful here. One of them is post-harvest management. Australia has figured out how to deal with some of the post-harvest problems we're having on the African continent. And the other is managing climate challenges – climate-smart agriculture. You have lots of solutions here. You've tested a lot of things. You have lots of innovative technologies that would work for African smallholder farmers.
Another area is digitisation – how to use digital ecosystems to deliver value to farmers and rural communities better. You have a lot of information and knowledge there. There's a lot of science and scientific research that goes on in this country that Africa can piggyback on. We don't need to start doing research if it's already done – we can piggyback on it and really deliver value for farmers.
There's a lot of existing institutional capacity building. In fact, as AGRA we've partnered with the Australian government to build the capacity of the small businesses that I was talking about. We have an institution – we've set up the African Enterprise Challenge Fund. It's a partnership between AGRA and a number of countries, and Australia has contributed to the development of the African Enterprise Challenge Fund, which is about raising and growing small African businesses in agriculture. So it's not like we are starting from zero.
Robin Davies [28:16]