Eleven institutional members of the Governing Council participated in a hybrid meeting hosted at the Bank’s Abidjan headquarters on 17 March 2023. They were the African Union Commission; Food and Agriculture Organization; International Fertilizer Development Center; the African Export and Import Bank; Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa; International Fertilizer Association; the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation; the Pan African Farmers Organization; Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Agriculture; the African Development Bank; and the AFFM Secretariat.

The AFFM strategic plan 2022-2028 prioritizes broadening access to finance through capital investments and policy reforms. Technical assistance will also be provided to boost smallholder farmers' access and appropriate fertilizer use.

Council members congratulated the AFFM for successfully delivering trade credit guarantee projects in Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

Through the end of 2022, trade credit guarantees totaling $8.8 million provided 5.3 times leverage, enabling the provision of 112,268 tonnes of fertilizer to 690,896 smallholder farmers in the four countries. Under these projects, 97 small and medium enterprises gained access to finance, and 138 companies, including fertilizer suppliers, hub-agro dealers and aggregators, and 20,987 smallholder farmers, benefited from capacity building

To scale up its trade credit guarantee investments, the AFFM has developed a pipeline of projects for implementation in 2023. These will be rolled out in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

The Council has endorsed the AFFM annual report for 2022 and the work program and budget for 2023.

Beth Dunford, African Development Bank Vice President for Agriculture, Human and Social Development, said AFFM is one of the important vehicles for achieving the Bank’s Feed Africa Strategy objectives. “It is no surprise that AFFM has been instrumental in supporting the implementation of the bank’s African Emergency Food Production Facility. I’m proud to say that the bank has mobilized our agriculture expertise to roll out facility programs in 24 African countries.”

Ahead of the 2023 Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health Summit (AFSH), scheduled for June and July 2023 in Dakar, Senegal, Amb. Josefa Sacko, African Union Commissioner for Agriculture, Rural Development, Blue Economy and Sustainable Environment and chair of the AFFM Governing Council, said that AFFM must be strengthened to support the implementation of decisions that will emerge from the summit. Janet Ademe, Head of Rural Development Division at the African Union Commission, spoke on Amb. Sacko’s behalf.   

The processes of sustainable production, distribution, use and management of fertilizers and soil health are critical for the transformation of African agriculture. All of these call for AFFM to undertake its function to avail appropriate financing instruments, which will allow the private sector to invest, and for our farmers to have access and appropriately use this important input in African agriculture.