- Follow the money, find the injustice: Industrial agriculture is bankrolled, agroecology is starved.
In March 2025, AFSA convened over 100 food systems actors from across Africa in Nairobi to expose how industrial agriculture is bankrolled by global financial systems that perpetuate injustice, debt, land grabs, and ecological harm. The outcome: a bold roadmap to shift financial power away from extractive agribusiness and toward African-led agroecology.
The report reveals that major Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) like the World Bank, AfDB, and private equity funds are flooding Africa with billions to fuel industrial agriculture financing toxic inputs, land consolidation, and monoculture exports, while sidelining smallholder farmers. Evidence shows that only 2.7% of European agricultural aid between 2016–2018 supported agroecology, despite its proven benefits for climate resilience, nutrition, and biodiversity.
Participants sounded the alarm on the devastating public health impacts of pesticides (76% of which are banned in the Global North), the erosion of seed sovereignty through AfCFTA’s IPR protocol, and the myth of “unused land” used to justify displacement of millions. But they also shared hopeful stories, from community seed banks in Kenya to national agroecology policies in Senegal and The Gambia.
This report captures not only a moment of resistance but a turning point in the struggle to reshape Africa’s food and farming systems. The Nairobi gathering laid the foundations for a continent-wide campaign to shift financial power, away from extractive, colonial models of agriculture and toward agroecological systems rooted in African values, community knowledge, and ecological justice.
AFSA will now take forward this momentum by publishing research and advocacy tools, convening regional and national dialogues, amplifying farmer and youth voices, and influencing policy at the continental level. Agroecology is not a technical fix, it is a political, cultural, and economic movement reclaiming African food systems from corporate and financial capture.
