- Africa has 60% of the world’s uncultivated land; the question is, can it cultivate prosperity
When Ajay Banga, President of the World Bank Group, took the stage at the AgriConnect Flagship Event during the 2025 Annual Meetings, his message was both urgent and ambitious: agriculture must move beyond feeding nations to employing them.
“The challenge is to make agriculture a driver of jobs, income, and food security at sc
ale,” Banga said. “We must grow more food, but turn that growth into a business that produces higher incomes for smallholder farmers and opportunity across entire economies.”
With 1.2 billion young people set to enter developing-country labour markets within 15 years, but only 400 million jobs projected, the gap of hundreds of millions, Banga warned, could either power the global economy or spill over into unrest and migration.
For Africa, which holds 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, the World Bank’s pivot to agribusiness as a key growth engine presents both a challenge and an opening. Ghana and its neighbours, long dependent on commodity exports, now face pressure to modernise farming and link it with structured value chains that create jobs, add value, and fuel industrialisation.
“Emerging markets,”, Banga said, “have the ingredients: land, sun, water, and people.” What they often lack are the systems, credit, storage, insurance, reliable power, and connectivity that make farming bankable and scalable.
The World Bank Group is betting big on transforming that equation.
Under a new strategy, the Bank plans to double its agribusiness commitments to $9 billion annually by 2030 and mobilise an additional $5 billion in private investment. The financing push forms part of Banga’s broader mission to create jobs, which is the bank’s “central mission.”
The approach follows a three-pillar strategy, which includes building infrastructure and skills, creating predictable regulations and business-friendly environments, and using risk-sharing tools to crowd in private capital.
The agribusiness focus sits at the intersection of all three, promising multiplier effects across manufacturing, logistics, and trade.
“This isn’t theory,” Banga noted. “In India’s Uttar Pradesh, the foundation, co-ops, resilience, and digital tools came together, and it delivered. Proof of concept: it works, and it scales.”
For Ghana, where agriculture is expected to employ about a third of the workforce but contributes only 20 percent to GDP, Banga’s framework aligns with the government’s ongoing drive to industrialize agriculture under its initiatives.
Access to credit, post-harvest infrastructure, and digital traceability remain Ghana’s biggest bottlenecks, issues that the World Bank’s model directly aims to tackle. The Bank’s local portfolio already includes initiatives in climate-smart agriculture, irrigation, and rural infrastructure that could dovetail with Banga’s new global strategy.
The President’s emphasis on cooperative and producer organisations resonates strongly across West Africa, where smallholder farmers dominate food production but remain excluded from formal financial systems. The Bank’s model, linking farmers with suppliers, insurers, and off-takers through cooperative structures, could accelerate the shift from subsistence to enterprise.
“Once productivity and scale improve, cooperatives sell into a structured offtake with SMEs or larger firms,” Banga said. “Farmers capture more value, lenders see predictable cash flows, and incomes rise.”
Perhaps the most transformative layer in President Banga’s vision is digital integration, turning basic mobile phones into economic tools. From AI-driven crop diagnostics and weather alerts to mobile payments and credit scoring, technology is expected to become the “glue that holds the system together.”
The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) has already supported digital agritech ventures in Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana, from farm-input marketplaces to satellite-based credit scoring systems. If scaled properly, such tools could unlock billions in financing for the continent’s 500 million smallholder farmers, who currently produce 80% of the world’s food yet remain largely unbanked.
“The data trail becomes a credit history,” President Banga emphasised. “Better underwriting lowers the cost of capital; lower costs draw in more lenders. That is the virtuous loop we are building.”
The broader shift marks a philosophical departure for the World Bank, away from short-term aid and toward systemic market-building. By embedding resilience from the start through climate-adaptive seeds, smart irrigation, and crop insurance, the Bank seeks to make smallholder farming a viable business, not a vulnerability.
In this, Ghana and other African nations may find renewed leverage in their partnership with the Bank. As the IMF’s fiscal consolidation requirements tighten public budgets, agriculture remains one of the few sectors capable of creating jobs at scale without relying solely on government payrolls or subsidies.
At its core, Banga’s message is a call for coordination, for governments, businesses, and development partners to “row in the same direction.” The World Bank’s new agricultural push, he suggested, isn’t a silver bullet, but a framework for cooperation that links infrastructure with enterprise and policy with productivity.
For a continent where youth unemployment remains a powder keg and food import bills exceed $70 billion annually, the stakes are existential. Turning Africa’s farms into engines of fortune will require precisely the mix Banga described: policy clarity, digital innovation, and scalable financing.
“Steal shamelessly and share seamlessly, that is how we succeed together,” he said with a wry smile.
If the Bank’s vision delivers, Ghana and its peers could soon witness a new breed of farmer, one who doesn’t just feed the nation, but fuels its economy
