By Akpan Glory and Felicia Imohimi
A non-governmental organisation, African Food Changemakers (AFC), has expressed its commitment to building one million entrepreneurs across Africa’s agrifood landscape.
Dr Temi Adegoroye, Executive Chair of AFC, gave the assurance on Friday in Abuja at the organisation’s 2025 End-of-Year Agri-Food Entrepreneurs Mixer.
It was themed “From Celebration to Strategy: Strengthening Africa’s Agri-Food Future”.
Adegoroye said the initiative would enable Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to thrive while strengthening food security and climate resilience across the continent’s food ecosystem.
He said AFC aims to build a community of one million agrifood entrepreneurs across Africa, noting that the organisation currently has over 8,500 members drawn from 49 African countries.
“AFC is a female-founded, pan-African non-profit organisation working at the intersection of entrepreneurship, innovation and storytelling to strengthen Africa’s food systems,” he said.
According to him, the organisation focuses on supporting smallholder farmers, youth-led agribusinesses and women in agriculture, adding that strategic partnerships and programmes would help AFC achieve its ambitious target.
Adegoroye said agriculture remains a critical national and continental priority, stressing that the mixer was more than a social gathering but a platform to spotlight people, policies and enterprises shaping food security, employment and economic resilience in Africa.
“There are many SMEs in the agrifood space that require this kind of network. By bringing them together, they can share knowledge, leverage one another’s strengths and turn challenges into opportunities,” he said.
He explained that AFC was established to provide African agrifood SMEs with access to networks, information, funding opportunities and policy engagement needed to scale their businesses.
“Sometimes what entrepreneurs need is not finance but access to peers in other countries to learn how they navigate similar challenges and apply those lessons locally,” he said.
Adegoroye outlined the mixer as an annual event designed to celebrate agrifood entrepreneurs, promote collaboration and highlight the often-overlooked contributions of SMEs to Africa’s food systems.
“These entrepreneurs work across the value chain, from input supply and production to processing, marketing and distribution and they are the ones feeding us,” he said.
Also speaking, Dr Michael Adeoye, Group Head, Finance Facilitation at the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL), said Nigeria has about seven million hectares of arable land, with only 3.7 million hectares currently under cultivation.
Adeoye called on the Federal Government to establish an infrastructure development fund to support land preparation and improve access to agricultural land.
“If we open up more land, farmers can operate across different locations, productivity will increase and insecurity will be reduced,” he said. (NAN)
Edited by Tosin Kolade
