Agriculture in Africa has yet to achieve its full potential for a variety of reasons.  Food security, together with adequate nutrition, is a matter of life or death at one end of the market, while good agricultural practices are necessities at the other. Whether it's food in abundance or eco-friendly food production – partnerships in agriculture are now more important than ever. 

Recognising the value that can be created through collaboration and partnerships in all agricultural projects to achieve sustainability for the agricultural sector, Grow Africa works to facilitate collaboration between governments, international and domestic agriculture companies, and smallholder farmers in order to lower the risk and cost of investing in agriculture, and improve the speed of return to all stakeholders.   The broader Grow Africa network includes farmer, civil society, development, and research organisations.

The aim of Grow Africa, a programme of the African Union Development Agency, is to bring together the stakeholders necessary to make private sector investment effective.  Grow Africa incubates and supports platforms and business models that enable those stakeholders to work together.   This is done through the singing of term sheets, which are legal agreements signed between two or more parties summarising the principle terms of a proposed investment by a company in a specific country. It is developed for the purpose of setting out the terms of proposed investments to facilitate the required approvals from the government as well as other parties to the agreement.

The term sheets are a result of Grow Africa’s Country Agribusiness Partnership Framework (CAP-F), which responds to the Agenda 2063 agribusiness ambitions to (i) increase the share of indigenous private sector contribution to the continent’s GDP to not less than 50%; (ii) achieve a threshold of at least 90% of agricultural cash crops produced on the continent to be processed locally and the Malabo Declaration commitment to enhance investment finance in Agriculture, boosting intra African trade, ending hunger and halving poverty by 2025.  The identification of investments in priority value chains, to achieve compelling commercial and development returns has necessitated the establishment of agribusiness partnerships around the prioritised value chains.

CAP-F was launched in 2017 and the first set of term sheets were signed in September 2019 during the 2019 African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) and will result in a total of over $200,000,000 of new investment in Malawi, Uganda, Eswatini, Mozambique, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire by 2023.  The investments will connect farmers with sustainable commercial supply chains and will lead to the creation of over 10 000 new jobs. 

The signing companies are Dangote Farms Limited (Nigeria – Tomato value chain), Press Agriculture Limited (Malawi – Dairy, Macadamia and Soya value chains), Pearl Dairies Limited (Uganda – Dairy value chain) and IFresh Limited (Mozambique & Eswatini – Horticulture value chain).  The Term Sheets were also signed by the Governments of the respective countries committing to support the investments through policy formulation and enforcement as well as the provision of public infrastructure as appropriate.  Development partners have also committed to provide resources for capacity building and technical assistance to support out grower schemes and other value chain actors.

It is clear that the transformation of the African agricultural sector needs a combination of effort and support by both the private and public sector, and these term sheets takes the continent a step closer to meeting its true agricultural potential.