By Faridat Salifu
The problem holding back agricultural investment across Africa isn’t a shortage of money, according to Mohammed Ibrahim, Executive Secretary of the National Agricultural Development Fund (NADF).
Instead, he says it’s a shortage of investor confidence and the credible institutions needed to funnel existing capital into the continent’s food systems.
He laid out this argument at the ongoing Africa Food Systems Forum (AFSF) in Kigali, Rwanda.
His remarks framed a panel discussion titled “Activating Leaders to Unlock Investment in Food Systems.”
Ibrahim’s central point was that global capital pools are already large enough.
What’s missing, he said, is the confidence that gets that money actually moving into African agriculture.
Investors are looking for stronger leadership, dependable data, predictable markets and institutions that reliably follow through on commitments.
As he put it, capital exists — what’s often missing is the confidence that allows it to move.
Building that confidence, in his view, means developing an agricultural ecosystem where farmers can be identified and tracked.
It also means data that holds up to scrutiny, markets that behave predictably, and institutions that deliver on what they promise.
Ibrahim described a shift in how NADF thinks about public financing.
The Fund now positions public money as a tool to draw in private investment rather than a stand-in for commercial capital.
He framed this explicitly: NADF increasingly believes public capital should be catalytic rather than substitutive.
To that end, he said the Fund is exploring blended finance arrangements, co-financing structures, and on-lending.
It’s also pursuing strategic partnerships with banks, insurers, processors and development partners.
The goal is mobilizing bigger pools of investment into agriculture.
Public resources, he said, should target the specific risks and market failures that scare off private investors.
That, in turn, opens the door for commercial and development finance to enter at real scale.
Ibrahim also pushed back on how governments typically judge the success of public agricultural spending.
Simply tallying how much government money went out the door, he argued, doesn’t capture the full picture of an intervention’s impact.
Instead, he suggested a different question should guide evaluation.
How much additional investment did that public intervention actually unlock?
This reframing, he said, shifts the focus from spending totals to real catalytic effect.
Farmers themselves, Ibrahim insisted, need to be repositioned in this conversation.
They should not be treated as passive recipients of government programs.
Instead, he said, they are economic actors in their own right.
He pointed to stronger market linkages, better access to finance, and a more enabling business environment as key ingredients.
Together, these would make farmers and agricultural enterprises more productive, profitable and commercially viable.
Ibrahim said NADF’s ambition is to help build a sector investors are increasingly willing to finance.
Financial institutions and development partners should be able to finance it too.
Getting there, he said, will demand decisive leadership, credible institutions, trustworthy agricultural data and predictable markets.
It will also require public capital deployed strategically to build investor confidence.
He maintained that all of these pieces together are essential to unlocking financing at scale.
That scale, he said, is what’s needed to transform Africa’s food systems and speed up the continent’s agricultural development.
