ASA 2026: Africa pushes for new Agric finance model, local processing to unlock food power

The ninth edition of Agriculture Summit Africa (ASA) closed with conveners, ministers and investors converging on a single argument: Africa must move beyond producing raw commodities to owning the processing, storage, trade and finance that capture value at home, and the finance industry must be redesigned to match the long cycles of agriculture.

The scale of what is at stake is not in dispute, as Africa spends more than $100 billion a year importing food it is capable of producing, the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Abubakar Kyari, a former senator told delegates. This figure captures how much value the continent forfeits by exporting raw produce and buying it back, with margin attached, as finished goods. Convened under the theme ‘Building the Next Superpower: Africa’s Food Power Play,’ the summit set out to turn that contradiction into a pipeline of investable projects.

Co-convened by Sunbeth Global Concepts, the two-day gathering drew more than 12,000 physical and virtual participants across development finance, agribusiness, research and technology. ASA 2026 was structured to mobilise a curated investment pipeline of $300 million and featured nearly 100 structured matchmaking sessions through its Deal Room.

Opening the second day, Dele Faseemo, Group Executive, Corporate and Investment Banking at Sterling Bank, distilled the summit’s central thread into a warning that food had become a security question. “Simply put, food security is national security,” he said. “Real and sustainable sovereignty depends as much on food security as it does on physical security, on law and order.”

Faseemo urged the sector to move “from potential to execution, ideas to scalable solutions, fragmented interventions to coordinated action, and from declarations of intent to measurable results.”

Across the two days, deliberations examined food sovereignty and strategic resilience, intra-African and global trade under the African Continental Free Trade Area, climate-risk management and cold-chain infrastructure, technology and data, and financing models tailored to smallholders, women and young people. A recurring point was that gains in one part of the chain, such as higher yields, are routinely lost downstream to weak storage, logistics and markets that farmers neither own nor control.

The Minister of Livestock Development, Idi Mukhtar Maiha, used his address to press for finance built for biological assets, arguing that conventional short-term, high-interest lending is mismatched to animals that must be bred, fed and brought to maturity. “We cannot finance biological assets as though they are fast-moving consumer goods,” he said. Maiha added that livestock contributes about $32 billion to Nigeria’s economy and could reach $74 billion by 2035 under a ten-year national strategy, but only if the country stops transporting live animals over long distances, a practice he traced to 1912, and invests instead in feedlots, abattoirs, cold chains and leather manufacturing to keep the value at home.

Sterling Bank’s Group Head of Agric Finance and Solid Minerals, Dr Olushola Obikanye, said the continent’s constraint was not its land or its harvests but what it does with them.

“Africa’s challenge is not a lack of agricultural potential, but the ability to convert that potential into productivity, into value, and, more importantly, into power. For decades, agriculture has been viewed as a sector focused on production. This platform seeks to change that narrative. We see agriculture as the foundation of broader economic growth, connecting farmers and producers to finance, to technology, to infrastructure, to processing, to logistics, to markets, and ultimately to consumers. The opportunity is not simply to produce more food, it is to create and capture more value: from commodities to competitive industries, from fragmented interventions to integrated systems, from subsistence to scalable enterprises, from food security to food power.” Dr Obikanye said.

One of the highlights of the Summit was the launch of AgricHub, an agricultural business platform designed to connect farmers and agribusinesses with financiers, markets and agricultural technology companies, creating an ecosystem through which capital, enterprise and market opportunities can more readily meet.

Speakers and delegates over the two days included Senator Abubakar Kyari, Minister of Agriculture and Food Security; Senator Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi, Minister of State for Agriculture and Food Security; Dr Benjamin Ashaver, Benue StateCommissioner forAgricultureandFoodSecurity; Sarah Ockman, IFC’s Upstream Advisory Manager for Agribusiness in Africa; Dr Janett-Star Erastus, Chief Veterinarian in Namibia’s Directorate of Veterinary Services, and industry leaders across processing, insurance, logistics and technology. Olapeju Ibekwe, Chief Executive Officer, ONE Foundation; Chief Ruth Ozigbo, Programme Coordinator for Agriculture Summit Africa, and Oame Airauhi, Group Head, Transaction Banking at Sterling Bank, were among those who guided sessions across the two days.

ASA 2026 was supported by a broad coalition of public, private and development-sector partners, including the International Finance Corporation (IFC), GIZ, UK International Development, Mastercard, IDH, the National Agricultural Development Fund, Development Bank of Nigeria, Federal Ministry of Livestock, YAPU Solutions, Sterling One Foundation, Saroafrica, ARILA Group, ThriveAgric, AFEX, Propcom+ (UK Aid), BATN Foundation, Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF), Noor Takaful, Leadway Assurance, and other organisations across finance, agribusiness, technology, insurance and development.