Grow Africa is a convener and catalyst. We bring together the stakeholders necessary to make private sector investment effective. We incubate and support platforms and business models that enable those stakeholders to work together. We also play an important role in disseminating knowledge and best practice on making responsible agricultural investments work on the ground.

We do not have an implementation or project management role, but work with technical partners who implement the projects we initiate or support. Nor do we provide funding for projects – as a convener, we help partners to connect and develop collaborations, and support the development of innovative multi-stakeholder funding vehicles.

Facilitating Investment and Partnership 

Grow Africa focuses at national and regional level on:

• Developing and incubating value chain partnerships that support national agricultural investment plans
• Mobilizing and supporting the implementation of responsible private-sector investment

Improving the Enabling Environment for Responsible Agricultural Investment 

Grow Africa also plays a key role in improving the enabling environment for responsible agricultural investment by:

• Generating and disseminating knowledge and best practice related to effective implementation of investments
• Facilitating access to affordable finance and technical expertise
• Maintaining leadership commitment to agriculture

Incubating and Supporting Value Chain Partnerships 

Grow Africa incubates and develops effective models for aligning private sector, public sector and development partner investments in African agriculture. A focus on integrated commodity value chains (or agro-zones) is increasingly seen by key African institutions, and by Grow Africa, as one of the most effective models for accelerating the implementation

of National Agricultural Investment Plans (NAIPs), and agricultural transformation on the continent. Incubating and supporting commodity value chain platforms in support of NAIPs forms the core of Grow Africa’s work.

The Grow Africa Secretariat:

• Works with partners to establish commodity value chains where commercial opportunities exist that are in line with national agricultural plans and show high potential for enabling growth of the domestic agribusiness sector, improving smallholder incomes and creating rural jobs.
• Mobilizes and supports private sector investment required to enable the commercial potential of the commodity value chains it supports.
• Facilitates public-private sector alignment on policy and infrastructure enhancement to enable the effective implementation of private-sector investments.

Grow Africa’s Approach 

Agribusiness plays an important role in the agricultural transformation process by providing

forward and backward linkages to other economic sectors of development. Apart from a rapidly growing local and regional market demand, the recent improvement in agriculture

growth performance opens new opportunities on the supply and competitiveness of agriculture commodities on the continent.

The Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which provides a framework for the National Agriculture Investment Plan (NAIP) largely focused on public investments in strategic value chain segments and priority commodities new post Malabo CAADP, the Country Agribusiness Partnerships Framework (CAP-F) process has a strong emphasis on the role of the private sector.  Grow Africa has been designated to lead the development and implementation of CAP-F.

The CAP-F aims to supplement the country CAADP investment plans by stimulating private investments. As one of the CAADP instruments, the CAP-F will 

• identify and set enabling policy reforms in motion through multi-stakeholder engagements and institutional support systems, and 
• establish collaborations that will allow the sharing of resources and capabilities for improving the efficiency of priority agribusiness value chains.