#AGRA Urges Global Commitment to Country-Led, Youth-Driven Transformation of Africa’s Food System

Addis Ababa, July 28, 2025 (ENA) -- The United Nations Food Systems Summit opened in Addis Ababa this morning amid AGRA’s call on global institutions and investors to prioritize country-led and youth-driven strategies in Africa’s food systems.

AGRA, reaffirming its long-standing, country-led leadership role in the UN Food Systems Summit process, stressed the urgent need for innovative financing and locally grounded solutions in transforming agriculture and building lasting resilience against climate change.

AGRA’s Board chair and former Prime Minister of #Ethiopia, Hailemariam Dessalegn, underscored the importance of local ownership of ideas saying it is the surest route to lasting transformation.

“Only when interventions are owned by communities and tailored to national contexts can they deliver enduring impact: transformation must be country-led and youth-driven,” he said, noting that AGRA has worked with 11 African governments over the past four years to embed food-systems pathways into national development plans, catalyzed governance reforms, strengthened evidence use, and built resilience, drawing directly from commitments made at UNFSS 2021.

The UNFSS+4 is a platform to assess progress since the inaugural 2021 UN Food Systems Summit and is designed to promote accountability and drive action and investment to strengthen the collective commitment to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Throughout the summit, AGRA is actively engaging in pivotal dialogues on unlocking capital for food systems, innovative financing models, and resilient value chains.

“It’s no longer news that the world is at a moment of reckoning, grappling with how to finance a future that is both sustainable and food-secure,” said Alice Ruhweza, President of AGRA. This requires food systems that are functional, inclusive, resilient and well-funded.

Ruhweza drew attention to the challenges Africa’s young agri-entrepreneurs, who are full of  innovative ideas, are facing including prohibitive costs of accessing finance due to risk profiles that are deemed unattractive by conventional financial institutions.

She called for innovative financing instruments that match the ambition of young innovators at the required scale.

C.D. Glin, President, PepsiCo Foundation and Global Head of Social Impact at PepsiCo Inc. said, “As a large global player in food and agriculture, sourcing more than 30 crops from 60 countries, we see the impact of climate change on food systems everywhere. Collectively we need to think bigger, act faster and partner in ways we have never done before to be increasingly farmer-centric, unlock breakthroughs and drive truly transformative actions.”

Across Africa, PepsiCo and the PepsiCo Foundation are working with partners to strengthen crop value chains, particularly in Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa, forging crucial partnerships with governments, multilateral organizations, development agencies, and private sector entities to de-risk investment and turn commitment into measurable progress.

As a strategic partner of AGRA, PepsiCo is working to scale community-based agricultural solutions through smallholder support.

This comes ahead of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) 2025 report, set to be launched today at the UNFSS+4, which tracks global progress on hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition.

The report reveals that while hunger begun receding in Southern Asia and Latin America, food insecurity worsened in both rural and urban Africa between 2022 and 2024. It indicates that the global gender gap in food insecurity narrowed from 2021 to 2023, only to widen again in 2024, leaving women disproportionately exposed to malnutrition.

AGRA is supporting a cohort of over 30 African small and medium enterprises (SMEs) participating in dedicated pitching sessions at the summit, including a high-level reflection on the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). These sessions aim to spotlight youth-led innovations and policy-aligned investment opportunities

Ahead of the Summit this week, AGRA launched the African Digital Crop Variety Catalogue, a first-of-its-kind tool that offers a comprehensive, searchable database of released crop varieties across AGRA’s focus countries. Developed by AGRA’s Centre of Excellence for Seed Systems in Africa (CESSA), the platform strengthens evidence-driven decision-making, from farmer field choice to national seed policy.