The Bank Takes the Lead?

Among our findings:

• From 2014 to 2020, WBG financing for African agriculture came out to around $1 billion per year. From 2021 to 2024, WBG financing in this area rose to about $3 billion per year. During the entire period, the WBG committed approximately $12 billion total to livestock projects in Africa. 
• Livestock is a popular avenue for agricultural development, not just for the WBG, but for African governments, as well. Out of 49 sub-Saharan African countries, 29 have hosted at least one WBG livestock project since 2014.
• A number of livestock projects emphasize a “productivist” take to agricultural development. Even some projects classified as emergency preparedness or recovery emphasize increasing the productivity of farmers. 
• The WBG’s theory of change has long hinged on shifting farmers from agriculture to more “advanced” sectors of the economy. Some livestock projects embody this logic with explicit intentions to reduce the number of farmers in a given country or region.
• With a new emphasis on networked technologies, including AI, the WBG is presenting itself as a vanguard for a new technology-driven approach to agriculture, yet the goals and the overall nature of the African Green Revolution remain essentially since its inception under the leadership of other organizations, such as USAID and the Gates Foundation. 

We conclude with some emphasis on the importance of putting farmers at the helm of any effort to transform African agriculture and promoting agroecology as an answer to endemic hunger and nutrition deficits on the continent.

Introduction: A new lead organization for the “Green Revolution in Africa”? 

Source: World Bank Group 

The World Bank 

Surely the most famous of the DFIs, the World Bank is the namesake institution of the World Bank Group. The World Bank distributes funding through two subsidiary organizations: the International Development Association (IDA), which works with low-income countries on poverty-alleviating projects, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which works with middle-income countries on projects that connect them to international markets. All the World Bank projects we identified as livestock-related projects are currently funded through the IDA.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC)

The IFC is the WBG’s private sector underwriter. Unlike the World Bank, which generally provides capital to governments, the IFC lends money and takes equity stakes in companies. It has taken on more of a role in African agriculture as the sector has borne more industrial and capital-intensive operations, like meat processing. The IFC also provides “advisory services” to help clients advance their business, both as part of its program of capital support and as a separate offering. In 2025, Africa was the single largest destination for IFC advisory services, accounting for 35% of program expenditures (though the IFC does not disclose how much of that went to agriculture.)

Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA)

MIGA is the WBC’s in-house guarantor. It functions as an insurer for cross-border investments in developing countries, protecting investors from risks of war and non-payment from counter-parties to encourage investment in risky areas. As of 2024, MIGA has housed another entity, World Bank Guarantees, which manages similar risk-reduction offerings from MIGA and the IFC. During the period covered, MIGA’s investments in livestock agriculture in Africa were related to the Silverlands projects in Zambia and Tanzania. 

International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)

The ICSID is a mediator for international investors. It is unique among WBG subsidiary entities in that it does not provide capital itself. 

2. What the WBG says about agriculture

WBG leaders have maintained a longstanding pattern of declaring agriculture, Africa, and, to a lesser extent, African agriculture as priority areas. Though the WBG leaders speak of what they understand to be shortfalls in African agricultural production as if they are the first to notice them, their rhetoric has changed little from the rhetoric of other groups who led it at various stages over the last two decades. In his remarks at the WBG’s latest round of annual meetings, which it held with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) last October, WBG president Ajay Banga said the following: 

Agriculture has always been central to development. But today, the real issue is, how do you make it a driver of jobs, how do you make it a driver of income, and how do you get to food security at scale? How to grow more food, but then to turn that growth into a business that produces higher incomes for smallholder farmers and more opportunity across entire economies?³

Banga introduced the matter of turning agriculture “into a business” as if it were a new endeavor, yet proponents of the African Green Revolution have been making the case for more than a generation. The following is from a 2004 World Economic Forum report.

Establishing market linkages and providing needed goods and services to producers and entrepreneurs can raise local food production and incomes … Viable models, when applied on a large scale, have the potential to substantially accelerate Africa’s Green Revolution and its corresponding goals to eliminate hunger and poverty.⁴

The “business” narrative also papers over an essential fact about African agriculture: Farmers already grow crops for money. Just because they are at the bottom of a market arrangement does not mean they do not act as part of a market. That discrepancy between rhetoric and reality points to a larger issue that, at stake, is not just whether agriculture becomes more profitable (or more “business” oriented), but who controls production, land, finance, inputs, processing and markets, and whether communities retain the right to define their own food systems. 

Banga’s comments opened the launch event for the WBG’s AgriConnect initiative (discussed more below). One number, touted during that event, reveals how little the WBG position on the subject has evolved in recent years. Said Tanvir Gill, the host for the event, African agriculture could be “a one-trillion-dollar market by 2030.” (See Figure 2.1.) 

Figure 2.1: A still from WBG’s AgriConnect launch presentation 

The figure is impressive, but it’s also quite old, first appearing in a widely circulated 2013 World Bank report by Derek Byerlee and others, who made the estimate themselves, based on the rate of growth of African cities and estimates about the purchasing power of urban vs. rural populations. At the time, the World Bank estimated the combined value of African agribusiness and agriculture to be around $313 billion, meaning an increase to $1 trillion would more than triple the value of these industries in less than 20 years.⁵

With time, other parties have revisited those figures and made their own assessments. As recently as 2023, the African Development Bank (AfDB) estimated the value of “Africa’s agricultural output” (presumably a similar scope as the one covered in Byerlee’s report) to be $280 billion, citing a quote from then-AfDB president Akinwumi Adesina.⁶ Another estimate circulated by the African Food Show, a trade convention for food and beverage proprietors that do business in Africa, estimated the value of the African food and beverage market to be around $346 billion in 2024, and projected its value to be around $567 billion by 2032 — a far cry from the World Bank’s 2013 estimate.⁷

Byerlee, et al were optimistic about the future of African food and agriculture, projecting the sector could add around $500 billion in value to the continent per year, compared to $150 billion at the time. However, they stressed that such a monumental change was contingent on a then-$10 billion agricultural trade deficit turning into a $20 billion trade surplus.⁸ Since their report was released, the deficit has only increased to almost $17 billion. What’s more, only four countries in sub-Saharan Africa have trade surpluses, and two of those countries (Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire) can attribute their surpluses mostly to a heavy reliance on cocoa production.⁹

Why does the WBG now tout such an optimistic case that is a) more than 10 years old, b) depends on changes that have generally not happened, and c) is contradicted by other, more recent estimates? The reason could be as simple as the fact that “$1 trillion” is an easily shared number and is justified by the WBG’s own numbers (if one doesn’t bother looking at more recent estimates). 

Yet perhaps another reason is that the WBG is essentially appealing to two audiences: The first is a general public that includes some specialists and policymakers who are interested in Africa and/or the Global South, broadly, and can get onboard with the overtly altruistic mission of the African Green Revolution but will not be investing themselves. A second group, the investors, are interested in a  particular country or sub-region and are only invested in the African Green Revolution to the extent that it benefits their endeavors. The latter group depends on the former group to keep the pressure on African governments to develop “enabling environments” that can better serve their ends. For that reason, it helps that actors like the WBG maintain the illusion that the future is bright and the past irrelevant, as though they are the first to make a serious effort to revitalize African agriculture, despite the fact that many entities have claimed to do exactly that for close to two decades. 

Making money, alleviating hunger — what’s the difference? 

That dichotomy speaks to a broader issue within the African Green Revolution: people guided by altruism and lofty ideals about development may define its continental scope, but people with often mercantilist ends are the ones who make it real. The WBG and other proponents have long said that altruism and self-interest are entirely compatible, yet the current $17 billion agricultural trade deficit is evidence of a major gap between rhetoric and reality. Investors surely recognize that Africa’s urban populations are growing and becoming more affluent, though they are likely ideologically indifferent to whether it serves those populations via imports or domestic production, and whether domestic production benefits smallholders under something other than exploitative conditions. 

Consider the rise of poultry consumption and production across Africa. The IFC has taken a special interest in the trend (see Table 5.1). Most of the cost (and thus a substantial portion of the resulting economic benefit) of poultry production is in feed (typically corn and soy). Small farmers across Africa grow these crops (especially corn), and the WBG has invested in their production, with the IFC making some substantial investments in animal feed processors (such as Bidco) and traders (most notably ETG), some of which support outgrower schemes. Yet feed crops are categorically “low-value” crops, meaning the profits per acre of land is small, and that, almost no matter what kind of support is on offer in an outgrower scheme, only farmers with large land holdings generally stand to benefit. Moreover, in the absence of import controls (which the WBG typically opposes), domestically produced feed crops have to compete with South American imports, which also pushes production towards low-cost operations that small farmers struggle to match. 

AgriConnect — the next phase of WBG investment in agriculture

With its new AgriConnect initiative, announced last October, the WBG plans to commit $9 billion of its own capital to agriculture annually by 2030, with much of the funding going to Africa. As described in a January 2026 blog post, under the initiative, the IFC will provide capital while the World Bank will devote itself to “the policy changes and government-led programs needed for success.”¹⁰ In this way, the new initiative will function as a vehicle for policy reform and market restructuring, and not just for capital. 

Though much about AgriConnect is the same old, same old — supporting large agro-enterprises with some residual benefits envisioned for farmers that service those operations — one thing that may be new about it is the partners involved. Beyond supplying its own capital, the IFC is being tasked with organizing an additional $5 billion from other organizations, including DFIs like AfDB and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Yet at least one partner not previously seen in African Green Revolution projects is also joining — upon signing a compact with Qatar that allowed it to open an office in the country, the WBG and the Qatari government also agreed to discuss Qatar becoming involved as an AgriConnect underwriter in the future.¹¹

The rhetoric of agricultural transformation is also getting an upgrade. Through AgriConnect, the WBG is also showcasing a timely new fixation — AI in agriculture — and aligning itself with various tech industry titans. At the AgriConnect launch, President Banga laid out a vision for how farmers might use AI in the future and how networked technology could incorporate them into a global financial system that has so far ignored them. 

Small AI tools and basic phones that can diagnose crop disease from a photograph, that can inform fertilizer choices — it can prompt action well ahead of a weather event and move payments securely. That data trail then becomes a credit history. Better underwriting lowers the cost of capital, lowers costs, draws in more lenders. That’s the virtuous loop that we want to build.¹²

Banga is not the first to talk up the imminent arrival of AI in African agriculture for the benefit of small farmers, and his comments follow a history of similarly influential enthusiasts talking about how mobile, networked technology can not just allow farmers to access markets, but allow markets to extend themselves to farmers. This is Rockefeller Foundation president Raj Shah speaking at the African Green Revolution Forum in Kigali in 2018: 

We can dramatically step up these platforms of innovation to accelerate Africa’s Green Revolution. A future where a farmer can use her smartphone to take a photo of a diseased leaf on a banana tree, send it over SMS to an expert-based artificial intelligence system, and in return, get a precise recommendation for how to treat the disease, with particular inputs delivered to her by drone may represent a viable alternative to traditional and often broken extension services.¹³

The focus on networked technology is perhaps best understood as one element of a wider agenda of incorporating small farmers into larger industrial processes — in effect, turning subsistence producers into suppliers of regional or international systems of production. In that sense, it advances an agenda that has guided the African Green Revolution virtually since its inception, of reimagining farmers as participants in a globally connected financial system (namely, as borrowers) and as fonts of data for AI platforms which can supplant farmer-serving extension services. 

Such an agenda informs much of the African Green Revolution to date, and it speaks to the WBG’s current and recent efforts to advance livestock production. 

3. The role & scope of livestock projects in the WBG’s agriculture agenda

The World Bank Group’s theory of development has long been predicated on moving people from agriculture into industrial jobs, like manufacturing. As two WBG economists wrote in a 2022 blog post, “Expansion of better income earning opportunities” hinge on “structural transformations” to the local economy, in part, through “the shift of workers and resources from low-productivity, low-earning sectors such as traditional agriculture to higher-productivity sectors through the more rapid entry and growth of firms.”¹⁴ (Emphasis added.) 

Within that framework, industrial livestock production has a unique role, as it bridges manufacturing and agriculture. Its raw materials can be locally or regionally sourced, and strong local markets can tee-up export opportunities as the industry evolves. As a nation’s livestock industry grows, it also supports other, interrelated industries, from feed production to veterinary medicine, which the WBG considers worthy of its support. 

As the WBG has taken on a greater interest in climate change, livestock has stood out as one of the leading sources of emissions in developing countries, and one of the fastest growing ones, as well. To that end, the WBG has seen yet more reasons to underwrite and transform it (largely in the same way that it has in the past, but with new tracking metrics and new technologies for paring back emissions). As a 2021 WBG paper states, “the WBG has a specific interest in supporting the livestock sector as a core strategy to reduce poverty and promote secure livelihoods in rural areas, while attacking vectors of climate change at source.”

The paper continues: 

While donor countries may be able to envisage alternative sources of protein and quality nutrition at scale, developing countries remain dependent on the livestock sector, both as producers and consumers. … [F]or the moment … livestock will continue to make an essential contribution to enhanced nutrition and improved diets in the developing and graduating countries. Ignoring this reality will be costly for the WBG both in terms of its international image and, therefore, its ability to produce change, and in lost opportunities to support struggling rural communities in the face of climate change.¹⁵

Both for African farmers and for the world, the risk in treating the same model with new metrics as an adequate response to climate change is that an industrial agricultural model that is at the center of the problem gets repackaged, only with new descriptors and numbers. 

Increasing livestock, reducing farmers 

WBG projects are often tied to bigger goals of transformation of an entire country. An illustrative example is 2017’s Transformation of Agriculture Sector Program Phase 3 PforR Additional Financing project in Rwanda. The project represents follow-on financing for a project that was co-funded by multiple governments, including the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands. The goals of this project included “animal resource intensification” and “professionalization of farmers” and was planned with the intent of reducing the number of people working in agriculture. As the World Bank notes, the project was intended to support the Rwandan government’s own goal was to reduce the proportion of people working in agriculture from 70% to 50% by 2020.¹⁶

“Intensification” in this case may not mean outright industrialization of livestock production. In a document outlining the project, the World Bank attributes a doubling of total production of milk, meat, fish, eggs, as well as corn and cassava from 2005 to 2015 to policy changes that “enhanced access to better agricultural inputs” for small farmers in Rwanda, not the construction of concentrated feedlot operations. Yet we should not interpret the ostensibly less industrial approach of this project as a turn away from industrialization. We should take the mere fact that this project is intended to reduce the number of farmers working in Rwanda as evidence that the government of Rwanda and the project funders, including the WBG, very much favor that mode of development. Even with substantial capital invested and the government interested, industrialization is a process, and often a long one, but it is one to which African Green Revolution proponents are no doubt committed.

4. Geographic coverage of WBG meat & feed, production & processing projects

While most projects for either bank are specific to a single country, the IFC has initiated four projects since 2014 that cover multiple countries in Africa. The World Bank has similarly initiated 18 projects that are regional. 

Figure 3.1: WB & IFC projects by country, 2014-2025 

Ethiopia has hosted more projects than any other, which is not surprising considering the historic place of livestock agriculture and its more recent standing as a center for agricultural development, though a number of countries that are not known for livestock production are also on the list. As you can see in Figure 2.2, WBG livestock investments over the past 10 years have touched most sub-Saharan African countries — though notably, not some higher-income countries, including several where the livestock industry is rapidly developing such as Angola, Ghana, Namibia, and Botswana. 

Table 3.1: WB and IFC projects by country (excluding dropped projects)

5. The World Bank’s investments in African agriculture & livestock

Through a review of its annual reports, we were able to assess the World Bank’s disbursements to agricultural projects in Africa from 2015 to 2024. (“Disbursements,” or the capital the World Bank spent, are the only figures available in the annual reports and differ from “commitments,” or the capital it has decided to spend. Since commitments generally speak to the World Bank’s strategic direction, we used these figures when available and disbursements when they were not.) 

Figure 4.1 

Figure 4.1 shows the World Bank divided its disbursements to Africa into two regions starting in 2021. The change coincided with a substantial rise in spending. In 2021, World Bank disbursements to East and Southern Africa alone outdid disbursements in three of the previous six years. 

While the rise in disbursements appears to follow a general rise in disbursements to Africa across sectors, the World Bank did increase the proportion of its capital disbursed to agricultural projects during this time. From 2015 to 2020, agriculture constituted 8.5% of World Bank disbursements in Africa, on average. From 2016 to 2024, those disbursements made up 9.25% of its disbursements to East and Southern and 11.5% of its disbursements to West and Central Africa, on average. 

The World Bank scaled down its investments in 2023 and 2024, from a peak of $4 billion in 2022. 

As of this writing, the World Bank has not listed a figure for agricultural projects in Africa in its 2025 annual report, nor has it added any livestock projects for 2025 on its list of projects.¹⁷ But we can assume the absence is not due to a lack of investments, only that the World Bank has yet to list those projects as of this writing. With the WBG’s deployment of its AgriConnect initiative over the next four years, we can expect the Bank to increase its disbursements substantially in the near term.

World Bank commitments to African livestock 

To assess World Bank support for livestock in Africa, we generated totals from the commitment figures listed in individual project reports, and not disbursements, as listed in the World Bank’s annual reports. In total, we identified World Bank commitments to livestock projects totalling $12 billion in 31 countries. Projects in East and Southern Africa accounted for $7.2 billion, of which $2 billion came from the Strengthen Ethiopia’s Adaptive Safety Net project in 2020, which was intended to greatly expand an existing government social safety net program in rural, drought-prone parts of Ethiopia, partly by supporting livestock production (see Figure 4.2). 

Figure 4.2

Characteristics of World Bank investments in livestock 

Livestock is a popular mode of development project. A majority (29 of 49) countries in sub-Saharan Africa have taken on a WBG-backed livestock or related agricultural project in 2014 to 2025.

While we only looked at projects that the World Bank identified as benefiting the livestock sector, of those projects, on average, the World Bank marked only around 25% of the allocated funds for “livestock.” In keeping with its historical role of using capital to shape the conditions within which private capital operates, even projects that are explicitly intended to serve a country’s livestock sector typically cover multiple related areas, with allocations for “crops,” “health,” and a sizable portion dedicated to the local government, often related to the oversight of the livestock sector. 

There is no significant difference in capital commitments between projects in East and Southern Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, more generally. 

Identifying themes in World Bank livestock investments 

Unlike the IFC’s investments, which generally target a particular company, World Bank lending tends to focus on a particular development goal or group of goals. We identified seven themes that most (73 of 79) of the World Bank projects relating to livestock incorporate. (These themes rely on our own nomenclature and do not come from World Bank documents.) Note that most projects touch more than one theme. 

Table 4.1: World Bank projects by theme 

Looking at how the various themes relate to the projects, some interesting differences emerge. As you can see in Table 4.1, there is an apparent division between projects related to pastoralism and others that prioritize enhancing productivity. In all, 33 of the projects incorporated pastoral or productivist themes, however only four align with both themes.

Productivist projects can also follow some notable patterns: 

Industrialization / value chain projects 

Society-wide transformation is a major goal across Green Revolution projects. If only for that reason, a project that is primarily about agriculture can include a number of other priority areas. The Transformation of Agriculture Sector Program Phase 3 PforR Additional Financing project in Rwanda (discussed in Section 3) is illustrative: As you can see in Figure 4.4, slightly more than a third of the project’s financing was slotted for “livestock” and “crops.” The largest share appears to have been reserved for the government to bolster its own administrative capacity in managing the desired transformation of the agricultural sector.

Figure 4.4

Emergency projects that are also productivist projects 

Emergency support (in the form of both funds for recovery after disasters and for preparing for future disasters) is a major variety of World Bank support. Yet, beyond recovery and preparedness, it appears the World Bank uses emergency lending not just to provide relief, but to advance an industrial agricultural model. Out of 20 projects we identified as projects intended to aid a country or region through an emergency, recover from one, or prepare for future emergencies, seven appeared to have some kind of productivist component. For instance, the stated goals of the 2022 Emergency Project to Combat the Food Crisis in Cameroon were to “strengthen food and nutrition security” and “increase resilience to climate shocks” of various households and producers. 

Cameroon was at risk of famine due to conflict, food inflation, and adverse weather conditions.¹⁸ While the emergency food assistance was one component of the project, the rest was mostly focused on increasing farmers’ productive capacity and enhancing their connections to markets in the name of bolstering food security.¹⁹ In effect, it was a typical African Green Revolution project, dressed with added urgency and some emergency food aid. 

6. The IFC’s investments in African livestock

Since 2021, the IFC’s commitments have shifted further upstream, away from processing operations that deal in animal products and towards livestock production. One way to think of the trend is that the IFC is now underwriting fewer companies that make chicken-flavored bouillon and instead more companies that make chicken. (See Figure 5.1.) True to its development mission, the IFC has also shown a willingness to underwrite operations in countries lacking “mature” livestock industries, with investments that include a poultry company in Mauritania and a beef company in Madagascar.

Figure 5.1

8. Conclusion

The greater role of the World Bank Group in advancing the African Green Revolution agenda in recent years is illustrated by the substantial increase in disbursements focused on agriculture for the continent. From 2021 to 2024 the average annual amount was nearly three times higher than from 2015 to 2020. A majority of countries in sub-Saharan Africa have taken on a WBG-backed livestock or related agricultural project from 2015 to 2024.

Recent spending uses the same rhetoric that technologies will benefit small farmers, but with a new spin on AI and networked technologies. Increasing productivity also continues to be a common theme, although directed in ways that reduce the number of people working in agriculture, and increase reliance on industrial supply chains. 

The WBG is strategically positioned to become the principal actor in agricultural financing, policy shaping and private-sector engagement across Africa. This analysis points to a need for more transparency at the WBG, and more accountability for its lack of progress in achieving the stated goals of alleviating poverty and hunger. For now, the WBG’s enormous capital resources are poised to deliver a future committed to industrial agriculture in Africa, one that reduces the role of farmers to debtors and suppliers for “value chains” that they cannot influence. 

While the WBG claims this move will alleviate climate change and raise small farmers out of poverty, history shows that it will not. A future rooted in agroecological livestock systems, pastoralism, public extension, local feed systems, territorial markets, and greater policy autonomy could do much more to achieve its stated aims, for the benefit of African farmers and the world.