CENTRAL IDEA
This World Food Day, “Innovate Today, Nourish Tomorrow,” calls attention to the role of agricultural innovation in building a food-secure Africa. Achieving this requires more than developing new technologies; it means ensuring farmers can access, afford and sustain their use through reliable financing, markets and support systems. Only then can innovation translate into stronger livelihoods, more resilient food systems and nutritious food on household tables.
Consider a farmer who receives a timely recommendation to improve her harvest. The advice is relevant, clearly explained and delivered in a language she understands, but the recommended inputs are unavailable nearby, financing arrives after planting, and no buyer has committed to purchasing the additional produce. Despite the promise of the technology, acting on the advice may expose her to costs and risks she cannot afford. If she cannot act, the loss is not hers alone: the harvest that feeds her household, and the income that buys the food she does not grow, the population her food feeds, stay as uncertain as before.
This illustrates the challenge at the heart of agricultural innovation: a promising solution needs the right conditions to become a practical choice. We see this challenge in our own work in northern Nigeria where nearly half of the sorghum farmers who tried an improved variety subsequently stopped using it1. The implications extend beyond individual farms: Africa had an estimated 309 million people experiencing hunger in 2025, according to the UN’s latest State of Food Security and Nutrition report2. While new technologies, research and agricultural programmes offer important opportunities to improve food security, their impact depends on whether farmers can access and continue using the solutions being developed for them.
World Food Day, marked on 16 October, provides an opportunity to examine this gap. This year’s theme, “Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow”3, celebrates technology, knowledge and new approaches to addressing food insecurity. Innovation is only half of the theme. The other half is nourishment, and the link between them is adoption: a new technology can improve what people eat only if farmers can afford it, use it and keep using it. FAO also emphasises that innovations should be affordable, practical and adapted to the communities they serve4. Meeting this standard requires more than developing a promising product or delivering a successful pilot. It requires the financing, markets, institutions and support systems that enable farmers to put new ideas into practice and benefit from them over time.
Why promising innovations struggle to take root
For a farmer, adopting a new technology is an economic decision shaped by expected returns, labour requirements, timing and risk. An improved seed variety may promise higher yields, but the benefits become less certain if the seed costs significantly more than local alternatives, requires additional labour or produces grain for which there is no dependable market. A failed investment can affect household food purchases, school fees and the following planting season, making farmers understandably cautious
Access to finance and reliable markets are central to these decisions. Agriculture contributes about 30 per cent of Africa’s GDP but receives only about 6 per cent of commercial bank lending, according to the African Development Bank5. For smallholder farmers, the timing and terms of credit matter as much as its availability. Financing that arrives after planting cannot pay for the inputs needed at the beginning of the season, while repayment due before a crop is sold can leave farmers struggling even when production improves.
The prospect of earning more from an improved variety also depends on having a buyer for the additional output. Programmes need to establish what buyers want, the quality standards they require and how produce will reach the market before encouraging farmers to invest in higher productivity. Without these arrangements, increased yields may not translate into higher incomes. Nor does higher productivity automatically mean better food security: where production costs are high, debts fall due at harvest or markets are hard to reach, a bigger harvest can still leave a household with less to eat or less to spend on food. The investment environment reflects some of these difficulties: funding to African agtech fell by nearly 20 per cent in 2025, with on-farm solutions targeting smallholders experiencing the steepest decline6.
What our fieldwork in northern Nigeria revealed
Our rapid assessment of improved hybrid sorghum and pearl millet adoption constraints in Kano and Kaduna this year illustrated how these challenges interact. Improved seed cost about four times as much as local seed, and only about 3 per cent of the farmers interviewed had ever received seed credit. Nearly all said they would be willing to take such credit if repayment came after harvest. Yet every farmer in our sample sold grain immediately after harvesting, often to cover school expenses or repay loans, and none received a premium for the improved variety7.
These findings help explain why making better seed available does not necessarily lead to sustained adoption. Farmers were being asked to pay substantially more upfront without assurance that the additional investment would generate a better return. Even where a variety performs well in the field, the farmer’s decision to use it again depends on whether the resulting harvest improves the household’s financial position. For a smallholder household, that financial position is also a food position. Income from the harvest pays for the food the farm does not produce, including the varied foods that make a diet nutritious. A household that must sell at harvest to meet school fees and loan repayments may have less to draw on when prices rise or the next season falls short, which is what weakens resilience thereby worsening food stability
Making follow-through part of programme design
Funders should finance delivery across several farming seasons and establish how services will continue after grant support ends. Programme designers should combine new technologies with appropriately timed credit, reliable routes to market and delivery arrangements that account for the needs of women, young people and tenant farmers.
Governments and businesses also need to strengthen the systems that make adoption viable, from infrastructure, research and extension services to dependable input supplies and transparent market arrangements. Meanwhile, monitoring should go beyond registrations and training attendance to track continued use over two or three seasons, understand why farmers discontinue a service and establish whether their net incomes improve.
At Dev-Afrique, we see a need to connect innovation with the institutions, incentives and delivery arrangements required to sustain it. Partnerships should specify responsibilities. Who maintains the service? Who responds to complaints? Who pays for ongoing support? Who decides whether an approach should change? These questions belong at the design stage.
As FAO notes, change happens when innovations are adopted, adapted, financed and scaled8. That sequence is what turns an idea into lasting impact. If the farmer introduced at the start of this article can access the right inputs, secure credit before planting and count on a buyer at harvest, sound advice becomes a practical choice she can act on.
World Food Day 2026 should therefore be judged by a more demanding standard: not by how many innovations are launched, but by how many farmers continue using them three seasons later. Besides, continued use as the first test, The final one is whether it raises productivity, strengthens livelihoods and puts more nutritious food on household tables. That is how the innovations of today will nourish tomorrow.
References
1. Dev-Afrique Development Advisors, Master Constraints Assessment Report: Rapid Assessment of Hybrid Sorghum & Pearl Millet Adoption Constraints, Nigeria & Senegal, July 2026
2. UN, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026. Food and Agriculture Organization
3. FAO, World Food Day 2026: Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow. fao.org/world-food-day
4. FAO, World Food Day Poster Contest 2026, which describes innovation as affordable, practical and adapted to different places and communities. fao.org/world-food-day/contest.
5. African Development Bank Group, “Global and African Financial Experts Urge Action to Enhance Smallholder Farmer Financing,” 18 March 2025. https://www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/global-and-african-financial-experts-urge-action-enhance-smallholder-farmer-financing-81871
6. Briter and AgBase, State of Agtech Investment in Africa 2025: Signals from a maturing market, 2026. https://www.briter.co/insights/reports/state-of-agtech-investment-in-africa-2025
7. Dev-Afrique Development Advisors, Master Constraints Assessment Report: Rapid Assessment of Hybrid Sorghum & Pearl Millet Adoption Constraints, Nigeria & Senegal, July 2026
8. FAO, World Food Day 2026 communication toolkit: fao.org/world-food-day/communication-toolkit.
