The ongoing 6th African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) summit at Gigiri in Nairobi has seen a raft of commitments made by global and African organizations and leaders to increase production, income and employment for African farmers. The Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation announced an extension of their support to AGRA (organizers of the event), who also celebrated their 10th anniversary this week.
Some of the announcements include:
- African Development Bank $24 billion to accelerate commercial financing and commercial lending to small farmers and agri-business, some of which will go towards partial risk and partial credit scheme to improve the quality of agri-business investments to Africa
- Gates Foundation $5 billion.
- $3 billion from the International Fund for Agricultural Development over 6 years (IFAD has a policy to spend at least half its $1.1 billion annual budget in Africa) .
- Kenya Commercial Bank pledged $350 million (including $200M towards market infrastructure and $150M to livestock farmers)
- Kenya Government $200 million towards young farmers and entrepreneurs market access, finance and insurance.
- Others were by $180M from the Rockefeller Foundation (including $130M to the Yieldwise initiative under AGRA to improve field storage), Yara fertilizer (to link small farmers to value chains), OCP Africa ($150M for local fertilizer distribution), World Food Program (will buy $120M from small farmers through a Patient Procurement Platform), MasterCard Foundation ($30M to give small farmers market & credit info on phones in conjunction with KCB) and finally, USAID reported it had invested $6.6 billion through its ongoing Feed the Future initiative.
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