By Faridat Salifu
The African Development Bank Group (AfDB) recently hosted an online Forum on Promoting Climate-Smart Agriculture for African Farmers’ Resilience to Climate Change, convening about 390 participants from 34 African and 10 non-regional countries.
The event brought together agriculture experts to share knowledge, promote agribusiness partnerships, and explore ways to scale climate-smart agricultural technologies across the continent.
Climate-smart agriculture—including heat-tolerant seeds, drought-resistant crops, and improved livestock breeds—can boost food production, enhance climate resilience, and increase farmer incomes. Research indicates that without adaptation, staple crop production in Africa, including wheat and maize, could decline by 20% by 2050, threatening both food security and the livelihoods of more than half of sub-Saharan Africa’s workforce.
The AfDB’s Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) program has delivered climate-smart technologies and training to more than 13 million farmers, increasing crop production by an estimated 25 million tons.
In Nigeria, TAAT interventions helped scale wheat cultivation from 11,820 hectares in 2021 to nearly 400,000 hectares in 2025, benefiting over 710,000 farmers.
Farmer cooperatives and private companies provide bundled services—including improved seeds, fertilisers, credit, and weather information—to smallholder farmers. For instance, in West Africa, Ignitia partners with telecoms like MTN to deliver hyper-local, GPS-based weather forecasts via airtime subscriptions.
AfDB has deployed over 80 climate-smart technologies across Africa. Millions of farmers benefit through local governments, cooperatives, private companies, and research systems, often unaware of the Bank-led support behind these innovations.
The Africa Fertilizer Financing Mechanism (AFFM) provides trade credit guarantees to reduce financing risks for lenders, ensuring fertilizer and input availability.
Between 2019 and 2025, the mechanism enabled the distribution of 145,772 metric tons of fertilizer to nearly 988,000 smallholder farmers, including 34.5% women, while providing training to over 171,000 farmers.
The Forum highlighted the importance of knowledge sharing, partnerships, and investment in scalable climate-smart solutions to strengthen Africa’s food systems against climate change.
