Unlocking Africa's Agricultural Potential

This new Africa Region Sustainable Development Series aims to focus international attention on a range of topics, spur debate, and use robust, evidence-based, informed approaches to advance policy dialogue and policy-making. This new Series synthesizes a large body of work from disparate sources, and uses simple language to convey the findings in an easily-digestible format. Ultimately, we want to seed solutions that can help accelerate the fight to end poverty in Africa. Across Africa, south of the Sahara, agriculture is the predominant sector in the economies of most countries, accounting for between 30 to 40 percent of gross domestic product, and the sector is a leading source of jobs for over two-thirds of Africa’s population. A country’s economic, environmental and social well-being is intricately linked to a healthy, wellperforming agricultural sector. Increasing investments in the farm economy can deliver high-impact development returns such as increasing rural incomes, boosting food security, making cheap and more nutritious food available to Africa’s bustling cities and protecting the environment through innovations such as climate smart agriculture. This is the overarching message of this publication, which explores how the World Bank can help Africa take advantage of a unique confluence of factors that creates a great opportunity for the region to make agriculture the engine of development that it rightfully should be. By publishing the Sustainable Development Series ahead of the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, we seek to inform, indeed persuade, the international community about the significant development challenges confronting Africa, and the new opportunities to overcome them for a better future for all.