Perspective: Africa's food systems are failing farmers: Can Dakar deliver?
Rizki Pandu Permana, Ph.D, Global Sector Head of Agri-food
The Africa Food Systems Forum 2025, held in Dakar, Senegal, arrived at a moment of rising urgency. Across the continent, hunger is growing, food prices are climbing, and climate shocks are intensifying. For young people, who make up 60% of Africa’s population, the promises of inclusion and opportunity remain largely unfulfilled. Yet in Dakar, the tone was different. Less celebratory, more grounded. Less about declarations and more about execution.
What emerged from the week-long forum was not visionary statements but a call to act on the priorities already agreed in the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme. If Dakar achieved anything, it was to remove any lingering doubt about what needs to be done.
Throughout the forum, SNV and its partners contributed to key conversations around these priorities: advancing youth leadership, embedding nutrition into food system design, bringing pastoralists into the conversation, integrating regenerative agriculture and the productive use of energy, and improving locally led access to climate finance.
Youth: From presence to power
Dakar featured high youth representation as panellists, entrepreneurs, and moderators, but young people made it clear that visibility alone is not enough. In session after session, these youth representatives, including Cisse Safoura, the founder of Health Secret in Mali, challenged governments and donors to move beyond token engagement. They need the targeted support, including skills, tools, market access, and an enabling environment that recognises youth-led businesses as key players.
Their message resonated widely across the forum. Despite their creativity and drive, young people continue to face structural barriers such as limited access to capital, insecure land rights, and fragmented support systems. Many have the ideas and energy to build viable agribusinesses but lack the financial and institutional backing to make them real. As Michael Kwame Nkonu, Head of Agriculture at the IKEA Foundation, noted, the system itself must evolve: commercial banks need to play a more central role in financing agriculture if we are to reach the scale required.
Profitability is key. Bernard Hien, IFAD’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa, reminded us that agriculture must be seen and supported as a business. Making agriculture attractive to young people means combining financial services with mentorship, technology, and investment in viable value chains. Financing youth in agriculture is not just a development goal; it is an economic necessity.
However, the gap is not just financial—it is also institutional. Decision-making structures remain dominated by older, often urban elites. As Boubacar Kanouté of the EU Delegation to Senegal said: “From top leadership to local systems, we need to act on what young people are saying. Creating space for intergenerational dialogue must be intentional.”
The shift from youth-focused panels to youth-led solutions will require reforms in financing, education, and land governance—but above all, it will require political will. True transformation will only happen when young people are trusted as equal partners, not treated as beneficiaries. Their leadership, creativity, and resilience are already reshaping agriculture; what’s missing is the collective courage to hand them the reins.
Designing food systems with nutrition in mind
Dakar also placed food and nutrition security at the centre of food systems discussions. For too long, nutrition has been treated as an outcome—a secondary benefit of agricultural productivity. But with 282 million people undernourished and over half of women of reproductive age affected by anaemia, that framing no longer holds.
Namukolo Covic, ILRI Director and former President of the African Nutrition Society, called for a reframing: “Our food systems transformation must be driven by a shared vision—one rooted in local realities, cultural heritage, and deliberate collaboration.” Nutrition must become a foundational metric for policy—not an afterthought.
Cresto Aleina, a climate adaptation expert at Global Citizen, added: “Nutrition is not a co-benefit of adaptation—it is a core pillar of resilience.” In other words, systems that ignore nutrition are systems that will ultimately fail to deliver health, productivity, and economic participation, especially for women and children.
That shift has implications across sectors. School feeding programmes must be better resourced. Traditional crops must be integrated into value chains. Food environments must be reshaped to reduce diet-related diseases. And above all, communities must be co-creators in the solutions.
Pastoralism: Bringing the margins to the centre
For the more than 268 million people who depend on pastoralist livelihoods, food systems policy have long felt distant. In Dakar, their role featured in several sessions—marking a long-overdue conversation about inclusion and relevance. This raises an important question: how can we involve pastoralists in enhancing food and nutrition security? Dr Huyam Salih of AU-IBAR offered a thoughtful response: strengthen their role in value chains, support cross-border mobility, and invest in regional cooperation.
Her point echoed a broader call to recognise pastoralism not as a vulnerable system to be replaced, but as a resilient and adaptive livelihood that contributes to food and nutrition security. It underscored the need to strengthen policies and investments that value mobility, social networks, and indigenous knowledge as assets for sustainable food systems.
There is also growing interest among young people in livestock systems, particularly when linked to entrepreneurship and innovation. But the livestock sector must be made viable through supportive ecosystems, access to climate finance, and visibility of agro-pastoralism in national strategies. The new 10-year Nouakchott framework on livestock and pastoralism in West Africa offers a foundation—but what happens next will determine whether pastoralism remains a resilient part of the continent’s food system.
Pastoralist systems are uniquely vulnerable to climate change but also highly adaptive—if supported. Technologies like GARBAL, which provide real-time data on grazing areas and markets, illustrate how innovation can complement traditional knowledge. But their impact depends on more than availability. Without investments in mobility infrastructure and supportive policy frameworks, these tools cannot deliver lasting change.
With global demand for animal-sourced foods expected to grow by over 60% by 2050, sustainable pastoralism must be part of the solution—not sidelined. It must be repositioned as a solution for future food systems transformation, climate resilience, and sustainable rural development.
Powering Africa’s food systems
One of the most significant shifts in Dakar was the recognition that energy, climate, and agriculture must be tackled together. Food systems remain heavily reliant on rain-fed agriculture and diesel-powered machinery. Post-harvest losses are high, and access to cold storage, irrigation, and processing remains limited and unaffordable in rural areas. A ministerial session on energy in agriculture addressed these bottlenecks, linking them to productivity, climate goals, and rural employment.
The launch of the Power for Food Partnership by SNV, supported by the IKEA Foundation, contributed to the conversation. The partnership seeks to connect regenerative agriculture with the productive use of renewable energy (RA-PURE) by empowering local actors to strengthen the enabling environment, expand adoption of RA-PURE, and build a solid evidence base to show what’s possible when food and energy systems work together.
But partnerships alone won’t deliver real transformation. As Annemieke Beekmans, SNV’s Director of Technical Expertise, rightly said during the event, lasting change depends on trust among stakeholders. Without it, even the best-designed initiatives struggle to gain traction.
This momentum continued with the launch of the Agri-Energy Coalition, a global platform involving SNV, AGRA, GOGLA, and other partners, committed to scaling renewable energy across agricultural value chains.
Yet energy integration is only one part of a broader shift underway. Across Africa, regenerative approaches such as agroecology are gaining traction as pathways toward resilient food systems, especially among young agripreneurs who are embracing sustainable, low-cost production models suited to local realities. However, Manei Naanyu, Head of Programmes at PELUM Kenya, noted that policy and finance systems must evolve with grassroots innovation. Young people are driving food systems transformation, but without supportive policies and access to finance, their full potential will remain untapped.
Combining sustainable practices with renewable energy can make youth-led enterprises more viable, productive, and climate-resilient. But sustained progress will depend on governments and development actors adopting integrated strategies that link regenerative practices, renewable energy, and inclusive finance.
Getting finance to the frontlines
The final thread running through Dakar was finance, particularly for climate adaptation in food systems.
The message was consistent: funding exists, but it rarely reaches those who need it most. Professor Tilahun Amede, Head of Resilience, Climate and Soil Fertility at AGRA, emphasised the urgency for governments to integrate adaptation into national budgets and localise funding and technical support. The call was not for new promises but for existing ones to be delivered through coordination, transparency, and inclusion.
Initiatives like the Dutch Fund for Climate and Development (DFCD), with its blended finance, technical assistance, and de-risking tools, offer practical pathways to close this gap. But more effort is needed to support a shift in mindset—from centralised control to genuine local ownership.
The Africa Food Systems Forum 2025 did not break new ground on every front, but it made one thing unmistakably clear: food systems priorities are no longer up for debate. Transforming Africa’s food systems means shifting from youth participation to youth leadership, rethinking how children are fed, land is governed, women access markets, and how communities prepare for climate risks. These are known challenges with known solutions. The window for delivery is narrow—but not yet closed.
Dakar was another moment of reckoning. What happens next will decide whether it becomes a turning point.