With climate change and sustainable development high on the agenda at mid-January’s World Economic Forum, African leaders took centre stage to address the continent’s challenges while spotlighting the economic potential emerging out of climate resilience and innovation efforts. At this “back to basics” Davos, delegations from across the continent led discussions on Africa’s need for strong cross-sector collaboration and private investment, with Nigerian Vice President Kashim Shettima emphasing how “Africa holds the promise, but we need partnership.”
Shettima notably cited agriculture as the key to realising Africa’s growth ambitions, rightly noting that the continent’s farmers must integrate modern farming practices and technologies to boost yields while building climate-resilient ecosystems. Given large companies’ growing will to not only mitigate environmental impact but actively contribute to positive ecological outcomes and climate adaptation, the international private sector is set to play a leading role in Africa’s sustainable farming revolution, with companies including Swiss security leader SICPA and European aircraft giant Airbus leading model initiatives.
Africa’s escalating climate crisis
While Davos provided Africa a crucial platform to showcase the continent’s assets and investment attractiveness – namely its world-leading youth population and growth of its agricultural economy– climate change presents monumental challenges to Africa’s agriculture-driven sustainable development agenda.
Soaring temperatures are already devastating African farming, with climate-fueled extreme weather events threatening key staple crops. East African farmers are reeling from the region’s most catastrophic drought in 40 years – a plague exacerbated by the subsequent once-in-a-century flooding– while the U.N. World Food Programme recently warned that 170 million people in sub-Saharan Africa face severe hunger.
Current climate projections provide little relief, with rising global temperatures expected to trigger increasingly frequent and damaging natural disasters, potentially slashing Africa’s already-insufficient crop yields by up to 17% over the next three decades while its population surges. Last November, the Earth briefly hit the feared milestone of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels – a threshold beyond which Africa’s food systems risk disastrous consequences, from dramatic spikes in famine to the erosion of a sector accounting for one-fifth of sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP.
According to the World Bank, unmitigated climate change will create up to 216 million climate refugees by 2050, nearly half of whom will be in Africa. Yet, for those unable to leave their communities, the climate crisis will continue to fuel armed conflict over increasingly-scarce water, arable and grazing land, while pushing the residents of decimated farming communities into organised crime and ecologically-devastating illicit economies – particularly artisanal gold mining, poaching and illegal logging.
Empowering communities with underground innovation
As Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo underscored at Davos, “one of the fundamental challenges” to reversing this climate crisis and achieving Africa’s development goals “remains the ability to mobilize significant resources.” Concerningly, less than 2% of global climate finance goes to Africa’s smallholder farmers, the continent’s agricultural engine responsible for roughly 80% of food production.
In this context, African Food Systems Forum head Amath Pathé Sene has rightly reminded that “change can only come with” private sector capital. Yet beyond funding, major companies with global reach must bring the right vision and ambition to local partnerships with African farming communities—transcending a siloed, tick-box ESG approach to support a much broader sustainability agenda.
Swiss security ink and authenticity solutions provider SICPA is among the international firms incorporating this emerging “regeneration” model to help revive both climate-hit ecosystems and their surrounding communities. In late December, SICPA’s subsidiary in Togo—where the company is the government’s partner in secure tax marking to stamp out the illicit trade—inaugurated a new solar-powered borehole, alongside leaders from Djato Kopé village in Agbandi and local government officials from Blitta prefecture.
A pillar of SICPA Togo’s ESG programme and contribution to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, this innovative infrastructure project will harness the community’s abundant renewable energy potential to sustainably drill for and generate a daily water supply of up to 30m3 for over 1,500 residents in the surrounding area. What’s more, the borehole will also support a broader initiative, led by its partner firm Feel Agro Consulting, to bolster local farmers’ resilience to climate change and drought.
With dozens of local farmers – 70% of whom were women – trained in sustainable agriculture practices during the project’s initial phase, the new water resources from SICPA Togo’s borehole have enabled the creation of a field school to help farmers put these climate-resilient techniques into practice, illustrating the multi-faceted impact that public-private partnerships can have in Africa’s farming communities.
Giving eco-conservation eyes in sky
While SICPA is supporting climate-resilient innovation below the ground, Airbus is mobilizing its technical expertise to provide farmers vital support from above. Through local offices across Africa, Airbus deploys its Earth observation and satellite solutions to monitor climate impact and support ecological adaptation efforts.
In 2022, the Airbus Foundation – the company’s philanthropic wing – launched a collaboration with the Connected Conservation Foundation (CCF) to preserve biodiversity and ecosystems in Kenya and South Africa, building on its contribution of satellite imagery to a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization-led project to prevent and mitigate drought impact in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia.
This wide-ranging programme has made imaginative use of satellite and AI-powered technologies to capture vital ecological data, notably generating detailed maps of water resources, grasslands, and forests that help local communities assess climate change’s impact on key natural resources and lead well-informed conservation efforts that will secure the future of Africa’s agricultural sector.
What’s more, the Airbus Foundation-CCF partnership has harnessed high-resolution satellite imagery to detect poaching and deforestation from space, helping local park rangers to crack down on these environmentally-catastrophic illicit economies that climate change, in a vicious cycle, continues to fuel by attracting drought-hit farmers left with no viable alternatives.
With the private sector’s technical expertise and financial firepower backing Africa’s climate-resilient transition, the continent’s farmers will be empowered to support their local community’s development and derive long-term socioeconomic value from their natural wealth. Building on the positive narratives of Africa’s potential presented at Davos, governments, corporations and development agencies will need to accelerate collaborative efforts to future-proof Africa’s agricultural sector before surpassing a tipping point.