Regenerative food systems in Africa: scaling solutions to empower smallholder farmers

Over the coming decades, smallholder farmers throughout Africa will play a pivotal role in supporting the continent’s economic development and enabling food security. However, these farmers currently face numerous constraints that hinder their productivity and profitability. Challenges include a lack of support and access to resources such as financing, technology, inputs, and markets.

Accelerating Africa’s regenerative agricultural transformation requires a farmer-centric, ecosystem-led approach that involves actors across the whole value chain. Impactful partnerships and collaborations between farmers, governments, developmental organisations, entrepreneurs, food companies, and stakeholders must yield innovative solutions to help smallholder farmers overcome this complex set of constraints. Access to resources and opportunities through resilient value chains is essential to optimising profitability and improving smallholder livelihoods.

Our panel of experts drew on from real-world examples and experiences, as they discussed:

• The current financial, economic and technological barriers preventing many African smallholders from implementing more sustainable farming techniques
• How can value-chain stakeholders best work together to build capacity, and support farmer-centric solutions to smallholder farmers challenges within fragmented value chains?
• The role of policy changes and support mechanisms in fostering robust, efficient and inclusive smallholder ecosystems
• Examples of new and innovative technologies that can improve rural access to financing, for improved livelihoods and climate-smart farming

This webinar was moderated by Toby Webb, founder of Innovation Forum.

This was the second part of the Focus on Farmers webinar series, hosted in partnership with Bayer Crop Science. To listen to the first part in this series, click here. 

To find out more about Bayer's work in this area, see here.