Around 9 in 10 women living in northern #Ghana’s rural areas rely on shea trees for their income. Most live on less than $2 a day. But today digital technology is helping to break this cycle of poverty - by empowering Ghana’s women #shea farmers to boost their profits, improve their financial security and literacy, and by conserving and cultivating the shea trees on which they depend. Here, Vitara (Sommalife) co-founder and COO Mawuse Christina Gyisun explains how her social enterprise’s digital platform works - and reveals the scale of the transformation underway in the region today. Sommalife is a Schwab Foundation Awardee. The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship champions outstanding models of social #innovation from around the world. Learn more: https://ow.ly/6Fbe50ZVuxY

Such stories remind us that agrifood systems transformation is about more than increasing production. It is about creating pathways for women agripreneurs to build competitive enterprises, access new markets, and capture more value from what they produce. Because when women prosper, communities prosper. And when farmers prosper, Africa prospers. #AGRA #AGRAImpact #InOurHands

ARE WE REALLY MEASURING IMPACT?? We talk a lot about impact in agribusiness. But are we measuring the impact that actually matters? In Ghana and across Africa, agribusiness is increasingly positioned as a pathway to jobs, food security, poverty reduction, youth employment, women’s economic empowerment and climate resilience. But there is a gap lurking behind many of the numbers. We celebrate: Number of farmers reached. Number of jobs created. Hectares cultivated. Tonnes produced. Loans disbursed. People trained. SMEs supported. These are important outputs. But they don't necessarily tell us whether lives have changed. The more difficult questions are: Did farmer incomes actually increase—and by how much? Did the jobs created provide decent and sustainable livelihoods? Did women gain greater control over income and productive assets, or were they simply counted among beneficiaries? Did young people move from seasonal, vulnerable work into productive enterprises with growth potential? Did farmers become more resilient to climate and market shocks? How much value stayed with producers versus processors, aggregators and other actors along the value chain? This distinction matters. Perhaps our impact dashboards need to evolve. Instead of stopping at "how many people did we reach?", we should increasingly ask: Reach → Adoption → Income → Resilience → Agency → Long-term transformation. And measure these outcomes across gender, age, geography, farm size and position in the value chain. The opportunity for agribusiness leaders, investors, governments and development organisations is therefore not simply to create more metrics. It is to create better metrics that reveal who benefits, by how much, for how long, and what happens when the project or funding ends. Because ultimately, social impact isn't the number of people we touch. It is the measurable change that remains after we leave. What impact metric do you think the African agribusiness ecosystem is currently under-measuring? #Agribusiness #SocialImpact #Africa #Ghana #ImpactMeasurement #FoodSystems #Agriculture #YouthInAgriculture #WomenInAgriculture #ESG #InclusiveGrowth

A few years ago, I was a farmer's son in Kamuli, Uganda, trying to work out how smallholders like my grandmother could get a fair price for what they grew. This week, I took part in the Concordia Annual Summit in New York, listening to heads of state, investors, CEOs, and leading philanthropies debate the same question from different perspectives and at a global scale. Here is what stayed with me. Jobs and capital. The World Bank Group President Ajay Banga a was direct: developing countries face a jobs gap that public money alone cannot close. The real task is to crowd in private capital at a scale that creates employment. Capital is already moving. Baihas Baghdadi of BAGHDADI CAPITAL put it plainly: the Gulf has gone from exporting oil to exporting capital. Carmen Diana Bruce-Annan of Ghana's Millennium Development Authority described a new emphasis on domestic capital and on partnerships between government, philanthropy, and the private sector. Different regions, but they are pointing the same way. Ownership matters. Dr. Lucica Ditiu of the Stop TB Partnership argued that governments have to own their challenges rather than keep looking to donors. She was talking about health systems, but I heard it as a lesson for agriculture, energy, and infrastructure too. AI is moving faster than trust. AI came up in almost every session, and so did the question of how to use it well. Dr. Kavita Bala of Cornell spoke about education moving beyond knowledge toward judgment. Krystal Sexton of Cognitive Capital Group stressed keeping human decision-making at the center as work changes. My takeaway is that technology only creates impact when people and institutions trust it and know how to use it. For emerging markets, that matters enormously. AI could open up advisory services, finance, healthcare, and markets for millions of people, including the farmers I grew up with. But that will take trusted institutions, capable people, and solutions built around local realities. I came into this summit having co-founded an agribusiness that connects Ugandan smallholders to premium markets, and having spent the summer with IFC working on agribusiness investment in Africa. I am leaving with a sharper sense of where those two experiences meet. Jacqui Canney of ServiceNow shared a line I will keep: instead of asking people what they do, ask what problem they care about. For me, that problem is clear: how do we bring private capital into emerging markets in a way that creates jobs and raises incomes for the people who live there in a sustainable way? Grateful to BAGHDADI CAPITAL, Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, and Concordia for making this possible, and to everyone who shared their ideas, experiences, and time this week. Iván Sven Glasovac, thank you for all the guidance. #Concordia2026 #EmergingMarkets #Agribusiness #Africa #ImpactInvesting

The Future of African Agriculture Must Include Women at the Forefront of Agritech. Women are not just participants in Africa’s agricultural sector. They are farmers, entrepreneurs, innovators, community leaders, and powerful drivers of economic transformation. Yet, despite their contributions, many women in agriculture continue to face significant barriers to financial services, access to credit, digital technologies, agricultural inputs, and profitable markets. At FarmWallet, we believe technology should break these barriers, not reinforce them. Through our Digital Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) platform, we are working to strengthen women’s financial inclusion by digitising community savings, loan management, and financial transactions. Our approach is simple: we do not seek to replace the financial systems women have built within their communities. We seek to strengthen them through technology. By helping women establish verifiable financial records, we aim to create opportunities for greater financial visibility, improved access to responsible financing, and stronger participation in agricultural value chains. As we expand our vision across Ghana and Rwanda, one principle remains central to our mission: When women have access to financial tools, knowledge, technology, and markets, we are not simply empowering individuals. We are strengthening families, transforming communities, and building more resilient agricultural economies. The future of agritech in Africa should not be measured only by the technologies we develop, but also by the number of women whose economic opportunities we help expand. Women must not be left behind in Africa’s digital agricultural transformation. They must help lead it. At FarmWallet, that is the future we are working to build. #FarmWallet #WomenInAgritech #WomenInAgriculture #FinancialInclusion #DigitalVSLA #AgriTech #WomenEmpowerment #AfricanAgriculture #DigitalTransformation #Ghana #AGRA

Sharing a few thoughts on SDGs 1, 2 & 8 Uganda’s Vision 2040 sets an ambitious goal: a modern and prosperous economy. The government terms it a secured future. Yet NDP IV acknowledges that Uganda is still lagging on SDG 1, SDG 2 and SDG 8. The numbers make the challenge clear: 📊 Uganda’s working-age population is about 26.4 million. 📊 Youth unemployment (15–24) is 17.9% 📊 4 million young people (42.6%) aged 15–24 are not in employment, education or training. 📊 Yet Uganda’s economy is growing and NDP IV is targeting higher household incomes, employment and sustainable industrialization. So perhaps the question is not simply 'how much we invest, but how we invest'? Could we shift more development capital towards strengthening markets, incentives, institutions and relationships of suppliers, financial institutions and service providers so that solutions continue and scale beyond projects? for example the recent food insecurity in Karamoja, the government would contract a local entrepreneur to supply food items and the government provides people with direct cash assistance to buy food items rather delivering food items to the hungry population. But what happens to food prices, the inventories and quality of these items? I would like to talk about this the next day. Though the intended outcome would be to provide food, think about how many jobs and livelihoods that could have been created in the entire process. Same to development projects, people are supported with training and start up kits for busineses? really. Is this sustainable? What will happen to the businesses at scale, when more investments are needed and demand increases? Will the jobs be sustainable. This approach clearly ignores the markets. Alternatively blended finance make development capital more catalytic de-risking markets, crowding in private investment and enabling locally owned solutions? Perhaps Uganda needs not just more investment, but investment that builds markets capable of delivering and creating jobs for a long term.

In an interview with Matthew Mims, CEO and Co-founder of hiveonline ApS, shares how digital tools are helping more than 80,000 farmers across sub-Saharan #Africa access #finance, markets, and agricultural inputs. But success isn't just about technology. It's about trust, empowering #women, supporting local #entrepreneurs, and creating fairer, more transparent #FoodSystems where farmers have greater choice and stronger livelihoods. Read the full interview: https://buff.ly/9BoJJ7c

A country cannot plan an economy it cannot see. ---------------------------------------------- Namibia's informal economy represents about 26.5% of GDP. It employs about 58% of the workforce. Social protection coverage is only 0.69%. That means more than half of the people working in Namibia are outside the formal economy. This is not a small part of the economy. It is a major part of it. If most workers are outside the system, then economic policy cannot focus only on the formal sector. The informal economy is not just a problem to solve. It is also a huge part of Namibia's economic capacity. The question is: How do we bring that capacity into a stronger economy? #Namibia2050 #Namibia #InformalEconomy #EconomicDevelopment

58% of the workforce. 26.5% of GDP. 0.69% social protection. More than half of the workforce is outside the formal system. That should matter when we plan the future. The informal economy is not a gap in the economy. It is the economy. The work is not to wait for those people to become formal. The work is to build the layer that lets them participate, earn and grow where they already are. That is the layer we are building.

Farming is more than production. It is also about identifying opportunities, understanding customers, creating value, managing resources and building a business that can grow. That is why agribusiness skills matter. CVH.Africa offers learning opportunities designed to help youth, women, entrepreneurs and food-system actors strengthen their business and entrepreneurial skills. If you have an agricultural idea, don't stop at the idea. Build the skills to turn it into a bankable solution. 🌱 Learn. 💡 Innovate. 📈 Grow. 👉 Visit learn.cvh.africa #Agribusiness #AgriInnovation #YouthInAgriculture #WomenInAgriculture