AFSA

AFSA Delegation’s Closing Reflection | Yerevan, Armenia | 31 October 2026

The world cannot continue negotiating the future of biodiversity while the communities who sustain it struggle to protect their seeds, lands, knowledge and livelihoods. This was the conviction that guided the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) throughout the 17th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP17) in Yerevan, Armenia. Over two intensive weeks, our six-member delegation stood alongside African farmers, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, youth movements and civil society allies to defend a simple but fundamental principle. Biodiversity justice must put people, rights and nature before corporate interests.

COP17 delivered the Yerevan Pathway and completed the first global review of progress under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. The findings were sobering. The world remains off track to meet its 2030 biodiversity targets, while inadequate financing, harmful subsidies and gaps in implementation continue to undermine progress. For AFSA, this reinforces a central concern. Global commitments mean little unless they bring meaningful change to the communities conserving biodiversity every day. We cannot continue financing the destruction of nature while promising to restore it.

Throughout the conference, AFSA carried Africa’s priorities into negotiation rooms, high-level panels, side events and public mobilisation spaces. We defended farmer-managed seed systems and the right of farmers to save, use, exchange and share their seeds. We championed agroecology as a practical pathway to biodiversity conservation and food systems transformation, consistent with Target 10 of the Global Biodiversity Framework. We challenged the promotion of false solutions, including approaches to synthetic biology that fail to adequately address equity, precaution, sovereignty and community rights. We called for fair and transparent benefit-sharing and a Cali Fund that genuinely serves the farmers and communities whose stewardship of genetic resources makes scientific and commercial innovation possible.

A major highlight of our engagement was AFSA’s side event on 24 October, titled “Digital Sequence Information (DSI): Understanding the Debate and Defining an African Civil Society Position.” Organised in collaboration with African civil society partners, the event brought the critical questions of equity, biodiversity sovereignty and community rights to the centre of the DSI debate. It provided a platform to examine how the growing use of digital genetic information affects Africa’s biological resources and the communities that have conserved them for generations. At the heart of the dialogue was a fundamental question. Who benefits when biodiversity becomes digital, and who has a voice in deciding how those benefits are shared? The event reinforced AFSA’s call for fair, transparent and accountable benefit-sharing arrangements, stronger protection of traditional knowledge and farmers’ rights, and coordinated African civil society advocacy to ensure that scientific innovation advances biodiversity justice rather than deepening existing inequalities.

Our delegation amplified these demands through strong interventions, strategic alliances and collective action. From the call to “Stop financing destruction!” to the pan-African campaign “Seed Is Life”, AFSA reaffirmed that Africa’s agricultural biodiversity is a living heritage, not simply a resource for commercial exploitation. Our engagement with the Just Transformations Network and other civil society allies strengthened solidarity across movements. As negotiations reached their final stages, we stood with young people inside the Blue Zone, raising our voices against false solutions and reminding world leaders of a truth too often forgotten. “You cannot eat money!”

We leave Yerevan with renewed solidarity, stronger alliances and a clear sense of the work ahead. Progress in global biodiversity governance must be judged not only by negotiated decisions, but by whose rights are protected, who controls resources, who benefits from their use and whether communities have the power to shape their own futures. AFSA will continue working with its members and partners to translate these demands into national policies, community action and sustained advocacy.

COP17 may have concluded, but our message remains uncompromising. No future in false solutions. Yes to real, rights-based solutions. Protect farmers’ seeds. Invest in agroecology. Uphold community sovereignty. Make biodiversity justice a reality.

 

SAVE THE DATE | 1–4 DECEMBER 2026 | ABUJA, NIGERIA Two Major Continental Gatherings. One Shared Vision for Africa’s Food Future.

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is pleased to announce the Africa Agroecology Entrepreneurship and Food Systems Week, taking place from 1 to 4 December 2026 in Abuja, Nigeria, under the theme “Taste Africa and Grow Africa: Through Agroecological Foods, Enterprises and Food Sovereignty.” Bringing together agroecological entrepreneurs, farmers, civil society organisations, policymakers, researchers, financiers, market actors and development partners from across Africa, this four-day continental gathering will advance a shared vision for thriving African food enterprises, stronger territorial markets, healthy African diets and food systems rooted in African knowledge, culture and sovereignty.

The Week will feature two major continental events:

On 1–2 December, the 3rd African Agroecological Entrepreneurship (AEE) Convening, under the theme “Breaking Barriers to Scale: Unlocking Opportunities for Agroecological Entrepreneurship and Territorial Markets in Africa,” will focus on overcoming barriers to finance, market access, investment and supportive policies, while creating practical opportunities for African agroecological enterprises to grow.

On 3–4 December, the 6th Biennial Food Systems Conference, under the theme “The Battle for the African Diet: Ultra-Processed Foods and the Future of Food Sovereignty,” will examine how industrial food systems and changing retail markets are reshaping African diets, threatening indigenous food cultures and farmer livelihoods, and what it will take to protect Africa’s food diversity, strengthen community control and reclaim the future of African food.

Four days. Two major gatherings. One powerful African movement for food sovereignty. Together, these events will connect economic opportunity with cultural pride, amplify African solutions and strengthen collective action for food systems that serve African people and communities.

Stay tuned for further announcements, programme details, and information on how to join selected sessions virtually. We look forward to bringing together AFSA members, partners, allies and food systems advocates across Africa and beyond to help shape the future of African food.

#SaveTheDate #Agroecology #FoodSovereignty #AfricanFoodSystems #TasteAfricaGrowAfrica #AFSA

Yerevan, Armenia, 19 October 2026 – A six-member delegation representing the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) has arrived in Yerevan, Armenia, to participate in the 17th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP17), taking place from 19 to 30 October 2026. The delegation joins global negotiations with a clear message: Africa’s biodiversity cannot be protected without recognising the rights, knowledge and contributions of the farmers, Indigenous Peoples and local communities who have conserved it for generations.

Held under the theme “Taking Action for Nature,” COP17 marks a critical moment for countries to assess progress in implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and translate global commitments into meaningful action. For AFSA, this means ensuring that biodiversity policies recognise farmer-managed seed systems, safeguard Africa’s genetic resources, protect traditional knowledge and promote agroecology as a practical pathway to healthy ecosystems, resilient food systems and food sovereignty.

Across Africa, millions of smallholder farmers continue to conserve, select, exchange and improve seeds that sustain agricultural biodiversity, food cultures and livelihoods. Yet these vital contributions are often overlooked in global biodiversity policies and benefit-sharing arrangements. Building on its longstanding Seed is Life campaign and advocacy for farmer-managed seed systems, AFSA will engage governments, civil society organisations and international partners to demand stronger recognition of farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange and govern their seeds.

A central focus of AFSA’s engagement will be the growing debate over Digital Sequence Information (DSI) on genetic resources and the fair sharing of benefits arising from its use. As scientific and commercial applications of genetic information expand, AFSA is calling for safeguards that prevent the appropriation of Africa’s biological wealth and ensure that communities who conserve biodiversity receive direct, equitable and verifiable benefits. In particular, AFSA will advocate for the Cali Fund to become a genuine instrument of justice, with transparent governance, meaningful community participation and resources that directly support farmer-managed seed systems, biodiversity conservation and local livelihoods.

AFSA maintains that biodiversity justice must begin with the people who keep biodiversity alive. The success of global biodiversity agreements must therefore be measured by their ability to protect community rights, strengthen local seed systems and ensure that the benefits of conservation and scientific innovation reach those whose knowledge and practices sustain the world’s biological diversity.

AFSA Side Event on Digital Sequence Information

As part of its engagement, AFSA will host a side event titled “Digital Sequence Information (DSI): Understanding the Debate and Defining an African Civil Society Position” on 24 October 2026, from 14:00 to 15:00 (Armenia time), at the Main Stage, Green Zone, Yerevan. The discussion will bring together African civil society organisations, biodiversity advocates and partners to examine the implications of DSI for Africa’s genetic resources, community rights and food sovereignty.

The event will draw on the expertise of biodiversity and seed sovereignty advocates, including Daud Ngosengwa Manongi of the Tanzania Alliance for Biodiversity (TABIO), Lucien Omer Wendyahoda Silga of FIAN Burkina Faso, and Nithin Ramakrishnan, Senior Researcher at Third World Network. The event will be moderated by Mariann Bassey, Deputy Executive Director Environmental Rights Action/ Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) and former Chair of AFSA.

Participants will explore common principles for equitable benefit-sharing and develop priorities for a stronger, coordinated African civil society voice in global biodiversity governance.

AFSA invites its members, partners, African government delegations, civil society movements, researchers and biodiversity advocates attending COP17 to join the side event and contribute to this important conversation. Throughout the conference, AFSA will continue working with allies to ensure that Africa’s farmers, communities, women and young people are heard in decisions shaping the future of biodiversity.

Africa’s biodiversity is its living heritage. Protecting it means protecting the people, knowledge and seed systems that sustain it.

Media Contacts

Ndèye Awa GUEYE, CROPS4HD Project Officer, AFSA
awa.gueye@afsafrica.org

Three storms at once

Today is World Food Day. This year it finds African farmers caught between three storms at once: a super El Niño, a war in Europe and a war in the Gulf.

None of these storms began in Africa. Africa did not heat the Pacific Ocean. It did not start the war in Ukraine or the war around the Strait of Hormuz. Yet it is African farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk and families who will pay the highest price, in empty granaries, dead livestock and children going to bed hungry.

That is what I want to say plainly today. These crises are not creating Africa’s vulnerability. They are exposing it. And that vulnerability was not an accident. It was built.

A super El Niño that hits Africa hardest

The El Niño now under way is one of the strongest on record. The World Food Programme warns it could push at least 49 million more people into acute hunger by the end of 2027. Around 24 million of them are in Africa: more than 18 million in East and Southern Africa, and nearly 6 million in West and Central Africa.

The damage is already visible. The June to September rains failed across Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda’s Karamoja. South Sudan and Karamoja are on track for their driest year on record. Now the Horn of Africa faces the opposite danger: heavy rains and floods along Somalia’s rivers, where famine is a real risk.

In Southern Africa, forecasters expect late, poor rains and long dry spells over the season that is starting now. Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Angola, Madagascar and Lesotho are of greatest concern. The worst hunger will come not now but in the lean months of 2027 and early 2028, when the food from a failed harvest runs out.

For a farmer who depends on rain, one failed season can mean selling the last goat, pulling a child out of school or eating seed meant for next year. A family can take years to recover.

Wars far away, hunger at home

The war between Russia and Ukraine has entered a new phase on the Black Sea. Both sides are now striking each other’s grain ports. Russian wheat exports fell by more than half in August. The FAO Food Price Index reached its highest level since November 2022. African and Middle Eastern countries, among the biggest buyers of Black Sea wheat, are low on stocks and will have to buy at higher prices.

The war in the Gulf has hit even closer to the farm. Since 28 February, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has been largely blocked. About a third of the world’s seaborne fertiliser normally passes through it. Urea more than doubled in price, from about US$400 to over US$850 a tonne in April.

World prices have since eased, but African farmers have not felt the relief. In July, urea still cost about US$975 a tonne in Malawi and US$933 in Tanzania, more than double the world price. Weak currencies, freight costs and port delays keep it high.

Fuel tells the same story. Ethiopia lost more than 180,000 tonnes of fuel deliveries, halving its daily diesel supply. In Kenya, record fuel price rises pushed transport fares up by about a quarter. Zimbabwe’s fuel import costs rose 40% in under a month.

Every one of these numbers reaches the farm. Diesel moves the harvest to market. Fertiliser that a farmer cannot afford means a smaller harvest next season. And the bread, rice and cooking oil that city families buy cost more each week.

Same storm, different shelter

The same shocks are hitting the whole world. What differs is who has shelter.

When fertiliser prices jumped, India raised its fertiliser subsidy by 11%, to 415 billion rupees for the summer season alone. The European Union proposed €540 million in emergency relief for its farmers, which member states can top up to about €1.5 billion. France added its own fertiliser aid. These governments had the money, the institutions and the political room to act within weeks.

Most African governments did not. Many entered this year already squeezed by debt. In nearly four in five sub-Saharan African countries, governments now pay more in interest than they spend on health or education, according to the World Bank. A treasury that sends its money to creditors cannot shield its farmers. Countries such as Ghana, Malawi and Sudan could not even pay cash for fertiliser imports.

So the shock that a rich country absorbs as a budget line falls on an African family as hunger. That is not a difference in weather. It is a difference in power.

A vulnerability that was built

Africa is not weak by nature. Its vulnerability was built over generations, and it is still being built today.

• Colonialism reshaped African farming for export. The best land, roads, railways and research went to cotton, coffee, cocoa and groundnuts for European factories. Food for Africans came second. Many of those patterns remain.
• Structural adjustment dismantled our defences. From the 1980s, loan conditions pushed governments to close grain reserves and marketing boards, cut extension services and open markets to subsidised imports. We lost the buffers that once carried us through bad years.
• We were taught to import our food. Sub-Saharan Africa’s food import bill was projected to reach about US$65 billion in 2025. Every rise in world prices and every weak currency now lands directly on our tables.
• We were taught to import our soil fertility. A farming model built on purchased fertiliser and hybrid seed ties the fertility of African soils to gas fields and shipping lanes thousands of kilometres away. The Strait of Hormuz has shown what that means.
• Debt keeps the cycle going. Money that should build irrigation, storage and rural roads goes to pay interest. Climate finance, when it comes, too often arrives as loans, adding new debt to repair damage Africa did not cause.
• The rules are written elsewhere. Trade rules, seed laws, intellectual property regimes and credit ratings are largely set by and for the powerful. They narrow the policy space African governments need to protect their own farmers.

These are not separate problems. They are one system, and it was designed to keep Africa supplying raw materials and buying finished goods. El Niño and the wars did not create this system. They have simply shown us, once again, how it works.

What must change

This year’s World Food Day theme is “Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow.” The innovation Africa needs most is not another imported package. It is the courage to rebuild food systems that Africans control.

1. Act now on El Niño. Governments and agencies must move before the lean season, not after it. Pre-position food, protect livestock and seed, and get cash to families early.
2. Rebuild public food reserves. National and regional grain reserves, run in the public interest, are a basic defence that structural adjustment took away.
3. Invest in agroecology and healthy soils. Compost, manure, legumes, trees and diverse crops build fertility that no blockade can cut off. Public money now spent on imported fertiliser should shift steadily towards them.
4. Protect farmers’ seed. Farmer-managed seed systems hold the drought-tolerant varieties we need. Laws that criminalise saving and exchanging seed must change.
5. Feed Africa from African farms. Support territorial markets, local processing and public procurement, including school meals, that buy from our own producers.
6. Cancel unjust debt and pay climate finance as grants. No country should have to choose between paying creditors and feeding its people. Adaptation finance must reach farmer organisations directly.
7. Give Africa its policy space. Trade and investment rules must allow African governments to protect their farmers and their food.

Africa can feed itself

Africa has the land, the water, the seed, the knowledge and the farmers to feed itself. Our small-scale producers already grow most of the food Africans eat, often with little or no public support.

What we lack is not ability. It is control over our own food systems, and freedom from the debts, rules and dependencies that keep us exposed to every storm.

On this World Food Day, I call on African governments, the African Union and our international partners to stop treating each crisis as a surprise. The next El Niño, the next war and the next price shock will come. Let them find Africa ready, fed by its own farmers and standing on its own soil.

Million Belay (PhD)
General Coordinator, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA)
16 October 2026

On World Food Day, African chefs unite to reclaim the continent’s culinary heritage, champion agroecology and put African food at the centre of Africa’s future.

On World Food Day 2026, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) calls on African citizens, governments, chefs, farmers, young people and food system actors to reclaim Africa’s rich food heritage and place healthy, culturally appropriate and ecologically produced food at the heart of the continent’s future. Under its Pan-African campaign, My Food Is African, AFSA is advancing a powerful message: Africa’s food is a source of identity, dignity, health and sovereignty, and its future must be shaped by the people who grow, prepare and consume it.

Across Africa, traditional food systems that have sustained communities for generations are increasingly threatened by industrial agriculture, the expansion of ultra-processed foods and changing dietary habits that undermine indigenous knowledge and local food cultures. Traditional African foods, despite their extraordinary diversity and cultural significance, are too often portrayed as inferior, outdated or incompatible with modern lifestyles. Meanwhile, the smallholder farmers, women, seed custodians and traditional food producers who sustain Africa’s food systems remain insufficiently recognised and supported.

For AFSA, reversing this trend requires a fundamental shift in how African societies understand and value food. My Food Is African is a call to reclaim our food, our health, our culture and our power. It challenges the notion that progress must come at the expense of African food traditions and asserts that the continent’s food future lies in embracing its rich culinary diversity, strengthening agroecological production and restoring the connection between people, land and food.

African Chefs Take the Lead in Reclaiming Our Food

This year’s World Food Day carries particular significance as African chefs across the continent come together to translate this vision into action. From 12 to 16 October 2026, the My Food Is African Chefs Network is leading the first continental MyFIA Chefs Week, celebrating indigenous ingredients, traditional recipes, African food knowledge and the farmers and communities who keep these traditions alive.

The initiative builds on the historic First African Chefs’ Gathering and Policy Convening on African Food Systems, organised by AFSA in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in July 2025. Bringing together participants from 23 African countries, the gathering adopted the Declaration of African Chefs, affirming a collective commitment to elevate African cuisine, defend indigenous food systems and strengthen the role of chefs in advancing food sovereignty.

That commitment is now taking shape through a growing continental movement of chefs who recognise that their responsibility extends beyond preparing and serving food. African chefs are educators, cultural ambassadors, storytellers and advocates who can reconnect consumers with the origins of their food, celebrate forgotten ingredients, preserve ancestral recipes and promote food grown through agroecological practices.

Throughout Chefs Week, participating chefs are sharing stories from their kitchens, farms and local markets, highlighting the relationship between indigenous seeds, healthy soils, traditional food preparation and African culinary identity. The week culminates in an online gathering on 16 October, bringing together chefs, farmers, seed custodians, journalists and other food system actors to celebrate their collective efforts, discuss the future of African cuisine and consider the adoption of the MyFIA Chefs Network Charter.

The significance of this initiative goes beyond culinary celebration. It represents a growing recognition that the transformation of Africa’s food systems must also take place in our kitchens, restaurants, schools and everyday food choices. By bringing traditional African foods into contemporary culinary spaces, chefs can help challenge perceptions that equate imported and industrially processed foods with modernity, while demonstrating that African culinary heritage offers opportunities for creativity, innovation, livelihoods and entrepreneurship.

Healthy Food Begins with Healthy Soil

At the heart of the My Food Is African campaign is a principle that AFSA considers fundamental to Africa’s food future: what we eat cannot be separated from how our food is produced.

African food is deeply connected to the land, the seeds and the ecological knowledge that have sustained generations of farming communities. Its value cannot be measured by taste and cultural significance alone. It must also be understood through the health of the soil, the diversity of crops, the integrity of production systems and the well-being of the people who produce it.

AFSA therefore calls for a transition towards agroecological food systems that restore soil fertility, protect biodiversity, safeguard farmer-managed seed systems and strengthen resilience to climate change.

The campaign also draws attention to the growing public health concerns associated with unhealthy dietary transitions and the increasing consumption of ultra-processed foods. Reviving diverse African diets, including indigenous grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits and traditionally prepared foods, is an important part of promoting healthier food environments and protecting the continent’s nutritional heritage.

Healthy soil, healthy seeds, healthy food and healthy people are inseparable. Protecting African food therefore means protecting the ecological and cultural systems that make it possible.

Innovate Today, Nourish Tomorrow: Africa’s Knowledge Must Shape the Future

As the international community commemorates World Food Day under the 2026 theme, “Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow,” AFSA emphasises that meaningful innovation must recognise and build upon the knowledge, practices and resources that African communities have developed over generations. The global theme highlights the importance of combining forward-looking solutions with traditional knowledge and inclusive approaches to ensure nutritious food for all while protecting the planet.

For Africa, innovation must begin by recognising the enormous potential already present in its food systems. Indigenous crops, farmer-managed seeds, traditional food preservation methods, agroecological farming practices and culinary knowledge offer opportunities to improve nutrition, strengthen local economies and respond to environmental challenges. These resources must be protected, developed and passed on to future generations.

AFSA believes that African chefs, particularly young culinary professionals and women food entrepreneurs, have an important role in this transformation. By combining traditional ingredients with contemporary culinary creativity, strengthening relationships with local farmers and bringing African cuisine into new markets, they can help create livelihoods while preserving the integrity and identity of African food.

But innovation must also extend beyond the kitchen. It requires supportive public policies, investment in agroecological enterprises, stronger territorial markets, greater recognition of women’s contributions and education systems that teach African children the value of their own food heritage.

A Call to Reclaim Africa’s Food Future

On this World Food Day, AFSA calls upon African governments and institutions to recognise food sovereignty as a foundation of sustainable development. This requires policies that protect farmer-managed seed systems, support smallholder food producers, promote agroecology and integrate indigenous African foods into national nutrition strategies, school curricula and public food procurement programmes.

AFSA also calls upon chefs, restaurants, culinary institutions and food entrepreneurs to become active champions of African food sovereignty by celebrating indigenous ingredients, sourcing from local agroecological producers, preserving traditional recipes and introducing younger generations to the extraordinary diversity of African cuisine.

To African citizens, particularly young people, the message is equally clear. Our food heritage deserves to be celebrated, protected and carried forward. Every traditional recipe preserved, every indigenous seed protected, every local farmer supported and every African meal prepared with pride contributes to a larger movement for healthier people, thriving communities and a more sovereign Africa.

My Food Is African is a declaration of identity, a commitment to ecological responsibility and a call for collective action. It reminds us that our food connects us to our ancestors, sustains our communities and carries the possibilities of our future. Reclaiming African food means reclaiming the knowledge, resources and choices that determine how Africa feeds itself.

As African chefs unite this World Food Day, AFSA reaffirms its commitment to building a continental movement that celebrates African culinary heritage, strengthens the relationship between farmers and consumers, and advances food systems rooted in justice, health, biodiversity and dignity.

Our food. Our heritage. Our health. Our future.

My Food Is African.

Grow with Nature. Eat with Pride. Live with Dignity.

Campaign: #MyFoodIsAfrican | #JeMangeAfricain | #WorldFoodDay2026

The third quarter of 2026 showed AFSA operating across the full landscape of Africa’s food systems transformation. From parliamentary chambers and continental policy processes to farmer fields, media spaces, youth platforms and international forums, the work moved steadily between ideas and action. The Pan African Parliament’s decision to advance a continental Model Law on African Food Policy created an important opening for greater coherence in how Africa governs food, agriculture, health, trade and the environment. At the same time, AFSA strengthened advocacy for farmer managed seed systems, challenged provisions in the proposed East African Community Seed and Plant Varieties Bill, and continued pressing for laws that recognise farmers not as beneficiaries of seed systems, but as their custodians and rights holders.

The quarter also placed difficult questions about finance and agricultural development firmly on the table. At the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, through the release of The Green Revolution Has Failed Africa, and in AFSA’s support for the Food, Land & Money report, a consistent question emerged: who controls the resources shaping Africa’s agricultural future, and whose interests do those investments ultimately serve? These interventions were matched by practical alternatives. In Yaoundé, 198 participants from the six Congo Basin countries adopted a regional action agenda for agroecology, biodiversity and climate justice. In Kenya, farmers, scientists and development partners advanced plans for an African agenda on locally produced biofertilisers. In Tanzania, researchers, farmer organisations and policymakers examined how evidence can better influence policy, while a new urban agroecology learning series began connecting practical experiences from African cities.

Climate action was another defining thread. In Ethiopia, AFSA connected negotiators and civil society directly with agroecology in practice before convening more than 130 participants from 33 countries to shape a common African civil society position towards COP31 and COP32. In Harare, AFSA entered the technical spaces where the next decade of CAADP implementation will be measured and financed, defending the place of agroecology in national and regional investment plans. At the same time, 24 journalists from 15 countries were equipped to investigate the science, seed politics and financial flows behind African food systems, while young agroecology entrepreneurs used International Youth Day to demonstrate that ecological farming can also generate livelihoods, innovation and opportunity. The Battle for African Agriculture podcast carried these conversations further, connecting science, policy, women’s experiences, environmental leadership and African knowledge with wider public debate.

This was also a quarter of profound loss. The passing of Sena Alouka, founding Chair of AFSA’s Climate and Agroecology Working Group, touched the entire movement. His life embodied many of the values reflected throughout this edition: belief in young people, courage in confronting harmful systems, faith in African knowledge and the conviction that organised communities can change their future. His absence is deeply felt, but the work carried across these pages is also part of the legacy he leaves behind. The third quarter therefore closes with both achievement and responsibility: important doors have opened, stronger alliances have been built and clearer alternatives have been articulated. The task now is to carry that momentum forward and ensure that Africa’s food systems are shaped increasingly by the people who grow, protect, prepare and depend on its food.

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The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is inviting proposals from consultants or teams to examine how African seed systems are financed and strengthen the evidence on the economic benefits of farmer managed seed systems and agroecology.

Building on AFSA’s existing research, the study will map public, private and philanthropic funding, identify who benefits, and assess how finance could better support farmers. It will examine yields, production costs, household income and profitability, alongside wider outcomes for climate resilience, nutrition, biodiversity and livelihoods.

The assignment will combine desk research and remote interviews with 8–10 proposed case studies, including at least four newly documented cases developed with AFSA members and other networks. Findings will inform practical recommendations for donors, development finance institutions and philanthropic foundations, with clear recognition of evidence gaps and trade-offs.

The proposed duration is 14 weeks from contract signature. Applicants should demonstrate expertise in African agriculture, seed systems or agroecology, financial analysis and evidence synthesis, alongside strong English writing skills and capacity for French-language engagement.

To apply, submit a technical proposal, itemised budget, CVs, two relevant research or writing samples, and references from comparable assignments.

Deadline: 30 October 2026
Email: afsa@afsafrica.org
Subject line: Proposal for African seed systems and financial flows study

Read the full terms of reference.

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is pleased to release its 2025–2026 Annual Report, documenting a year of collective action to advance agroecology, defend farmers’ rights and strengthen community-led food systems. Covering 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026, the report marks the first year of implementation of AFSA’s 2025–2029 Strategic Framework. It brings together achievements, experiences and lessons from an alliance of 48 member organisations, showing how local knowledge and community leadership inform action from farmers’ fields to national, regional and global policy spaces.

The report highlights efforts to protect farmers’ rights to save and exchange seeds, advance agroecology in climate policy, celebrate African food cultures and strengthen local economies. Key developments include the Seed Is Life and My Food Is African campaigns, Healthy Soil Healthy Food work across six countries, and support for 222 agroecological enterprises and 21 territorial markets. Member stories bring these achievements to life: young farmers and women restoring land and water systems in Zambia, communities expanding farmer-led agroecology across West Africa, and farmers in Malawi rebuilding soil fertility and improving maize harvests through locally produced organic manure. Together, these experiences demonstrate the practical value of African-led solutions for livelihoods, resilience and food sovereignty.

Reflecting on the communities behind this work, AFSA Board Chairperson Rev. Dr. Tolbert Thomas Jallah Jr. writes: “Their experiences remind us that food sovereignty is not simply a policy aspiration; it is lived every day through the stewardship of land, seeds, biodiversity, livelihoods and human dignity.” General Coordinator Dr. Million Belay sets out the ambition guiding the alliance: “Our task is not only to respond to crisis, but to build power, alternatives and hope.”

Alongside these achievements, the report shares the challenges, institutional developments and lessons shaping AFSA’s next steps, including the need to translate policy commitments into implementation and sustain investment in community-led change. AFSA thanks its members, communities, partners, donors and allies for their commitment and invites policymakers, researchers, civil society and the wider public to explore and share the report.

Read the AFSA Annual Report 2025–2026