When a shipment is delayed, a fertiliser price rises, or a currency weakens, the impact is felt far from the trading floor. It is felt by the farmer deciding whether to plant, the miller managing input costs, the trader waiting at a border, the parent buying food and the finance minister trying to protect households without undermining investment.
This is why Africa's food agenda can no longer be treated only as an agricultural agenda. It is a business agenda. It is an industrialisation agenda. It is a trade agenda. It is a resilience agenda. Above all, it is a sovereignty agenda.
The Kampala Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Declaration gives Africa a framework for building resilient and sustainable agrifood systems by 2035. Its importance lies in what it asks us to do differently. It must not become another well-written continental commitment. It must become a delivery platform that turns national plans into bankable investments, regional markets into functioning value chains and public ambition into measurable results.
That delivery logic is also at the heart of the 2025-2029 strategy of the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD), which positions AUDA-NEPAD as the African Union's development implementation agency, focused on moving from programme coordination to scaled delivery leadership. It brings together five broad priorities: infrastructure and industrialisation; agriculture, food systems, resilient environment and blue economy; skills, entrepreneurship and education; health and wellbeing; and institutional development and public sector governance. In this sense, Kampala is not a stand-alone food policy. It is one of the clearest tests of whether Africa can connect its strategic plan to markets, finance and execution.
Originally published by African Business.