Grow Africa’s founding partners - the African Union (AU), the NEPAD Agency and the World Economic Forum (WEF) -  announced the transition of the Grow Africa Secretariat from the WEF to an African base, hosted by the NEPAD Agency, yesterday at the Grow Africa Investment Forum  in Cape Town, South Africa.

The Grow Africa Partnership was founded jointly in 2011 to enable countries to realise the potential of the agriculture sector for economic growth and job creation, particularly among farmers, women and youth. The partnership seeks to accelerate investments and transformative change in African agriculture based on national agricultural priorities and in support of the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP).

“Incremental improvement will not enable us to achieve the goals set by African countries for 2025 (Malabo Declaration). We need a transformation that requires the coordinated efforts of a vast number of partners. That is why we need large-scale platforms for public-private sector collaboration such as Grow Africa to fast-track the implementation of CAADP,” said Dr Ibrahim Mayaki, Chief Executive Officer of the NEPAD Agency at the Investment Forum.  

“We stand at a pivotal moment of opportunity to capitalise on an enormous body of collective learning to foster successful public-private cooperation. We must seize this opportunity to deliver on the promise of African agriculture to drive sustainable and inclusive economic growth for the continent,” said Sarita Nayyar, Managing Director, WEF.

Over 200 companies in the Grow Africa Partnership have committed $ 10 billion of investment into agriculture in 12 African countries, an increase of 40% over 2013. Investment on the ground continues to increase, with $1.8 billion leading to the creaton of  58,000 jobs in 2013 and 2014. These investments brought improvements in services and market opportunities to 8.6 million smallholder farmers who form the backbone of the sector’s production capacity. 

The number of companies making investment commitments within the Grow Africa Partnership almost doubled, to 210. Over half of the investment commitments come from domestic agribusiness and service companies which benefit from Grow Africa’s focus on convening and facilitating multi-stakeholder partnerships to strengthen inclusive agricultural value chains.

Progress has also been made against 299 private-sector investment commitments, 200 government policy improvements and $6 billion of funding commitments by international development partners to support improvements in the enabling environment is tracked. The full report will be available late 2015.