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The Africa Food Systems Forum runs at the Kigali Convention Centre from 31 August to 4 September, with the official opening ceremony on 2 September. Organisers expect more than 5,000 delegates from over 50 countries; the 2025 edition in Dakar drew 6,554 from 86.

It is the 20th edition, and the theme is investment rather than aid.

Kigali, host of the 20th Africa Food Systems Forum. (Photo: Internet reproduction)

What the Africa Food Systems Forum is trying to do

This is the continent’s largest annual agriculture meeting, and the 2026 edition has been framed deliberately around capital. Five priorities dominate the programme: investment and finance, food security and nutrition, climate resilience, youth and digital innovation, and trade, markets and value chains.

The organising idea is to move money towards investment-ready agricultural businesses and technologies rather than towards pledges. The Deal Room is the mechanism, connecting agribusinesses and entrepreneurs directly with investors and financial institutions.

Last year’s edition in Senegal saw six countries present investment programmes worth more than US$6 billion. Kigali is meant to convert more of that pipeline into signed transactions.

The targets that give the meeting its numbers

The forum sits underneath a continental framework agreed in January 2025. The African Union’s Kampala CAADP Strategy and Action Plan 2026-2035 commits members to raising agrifood output by 45% by 2035.

It also targets US$100 billion in public and private agrifood investment by 2035, a halving of post-harvest losses, a tripling of intra-African trade in agrifood products and inputs, and locally processed food rising to 35% of agrifood GDP. Those are the benchmarks against which the week will eventually be judged.

Post-harvest losses are the least glamorous item on that list and arguably the most consequential. Food that rots between the farm and the market is production the continent has already paid for and does not eat.

Why the framing has moved from production to jobs

The older version of this conversation asked how much food Africa produces. The current one asks whether farmers can produce enough nutritious food, whether it reaches consumers efficiently and whether production generates decent incomes.

That shift reflects demographics as much as agronomy. With the continent’s population and workforce expanding quickly, agricultural modernisation is increasingly argued as a jobs and industrialisation strategy rather than a food-security programme.

The gap it has to close is large. An estimated 309 million people in Africa were undernourished in 2025, according to the United Nations State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026, and affordable, nutritious diets remain out of reach for many more.

Agriculture also remains the main source of livelihoods in rural communities. That makes productivity and investment central to the employment question, not adjacent to it.

What Rwanda gets out of hosting

For Rwanda, the 20th edition is a showcase, and its second time hosting the forum in three years after the 2024 edition in Kigali. The country has spent two decades building a reputation for administrative reliability and has used conference hosting as an instrument of that strategy.

Kigali is now one of the more established meeting points on the continent, and the Convention Centre has become the venue of choice for continental gatherings. The forum lets Rwanda present its own agricultural transformation to an audience with capital.

An Africa Food Festival runs alongside the summit, organised by the African Food Fellowship with the Africa Food Systems Forum, AGRA and the City of Kigali. Its Culinary Village pairs African food, music and crafts with food-business and investment programming.

The test that comes after the week ends

Continental forums have a well-known failure mode, which is that the communique outlives the commitments. This one is unusually explicit about wanting to be measured differently.

The meeting will be judged less by the number of leaders attending than by investments secured, food produced, jobs created and commitments translated into action. That is the organisers’ own formulation.

For investors watching from outside the continent, the useful signal will be what emerges from the Deal Room rather than from the plenaries.

No headline investment total had been announced by the third day. The firmest number to emerge so far is retrospective: the African Development Bank told a Kigali side event that its African Emergency Food Production Facility had produced more than 45 million tonnes of food and reached close to 15 million farmers, 38.8% of them women.

Announced programmes are not the same as deployed capital, and the gap between the two has been the story of African agricultural finance for a generation.

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