As delegates gather at the Kintélé Conference Centre this week for the African Development Bank Group’s 2026 Annual Meetings, convened under the theme “Mobilising Africa’s Development Financing at Scale,” the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is pressing a sharper question on the Bank: not how much finance is mobilised, but who it serves — and whether the assumptions behind it hold up at all.
Two recent AFSA studies — a portfolio analysis of the Bank’s agricultural financing from 2019 to 2025, and a closer look at the 40 Dakar 2 “Feed Africa” country compacts — find that the Bank has become one of Africa’s most influential agricultural financiers, channelling billions into value chains, agro-industrial zones and large agribusinesses, while support for the diversified, farmer-led systems that feed most of the continent remains marginal. A third study, by the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, goes further — dismantling the very narrative of “idle” and “available” land on which the Feed Africa agenda rests.
