Addis ababa: 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 reaffirmed its long-standing, country-led leadership role in the UN Food Systems Summit process, stressing the urgent need for innovative financing and locally grounded solutions in transforming agriculture and building lasting resilience against climate change.
According to Ethiopian News Agency, AGRA emphasized the importance of interventions owned by communities and tailored to national contexts for delivering enduring impact. The organization highlighted its collaboration with 11 African governments over the past four years to embed food-systems pathways into national development plans, catalyze governance reforms, strengthen evidence use, and build resilience, drawing from commitments made at UNFSS 2021.
The UNFSS+4 serves as a platform to assess progress since the inaugural 2021 UN Food Systems Summit, promoting accountability and driving 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.
Alice Ruhweza, President of AGRA, noted that the world is at a moment of reckoning, grappling with financing a sustainable and food-secure future. She emphasized the need for functional, inclusive, resilient, and well-funded food systems. Ruhweza also highlighted the challenges faced by Africa’s young agri-entrepreneurs, including prohibitive costs of accessing finance due to unfavorable risk profiles, and called for innovative financing instruments that match the ambition of young innovators at the required scale.
C.D. Glin, President of PepsiCo Foundation and Global Head of Social Impact at PepsiCo Inc., expressed that climate change impacts food systems globally. He underscored the need for collective, farmer-centric actions to unlock breakthroughs and drive transformative actions. PepsiCo and the PepsiCo Foundation are working across Africa to strengthen crop value chains, particularly in Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Africa, by forging crucial partnerships with governments, multilateral organizations, development agencies, and private sector entities.
As a strategic partner of AGRA, PepsiCo is working to scale community-based agricultural solutions through smallholder support. This initiative comes ahead of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) 2025 report, which tracks global progress on hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition. The report reveals that while hunger has begun receding in Southern Asia and Latin America, food insecurity worsened in both rural and urban Africa between 2022 and 2024, with the global gender gap in food insecurity narrowing from 2021 to 2023, only to widen again in 2024.
AGRA is supporting 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, AGRA launched the African Digital Crop Variety Catalogue, a first-of-its-kind tool offering 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.