By Duncan Mboyah
To meet the targets of the Africa’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), experts have developed a new policy playbook to fasten the implementation of the Kampala declaration on building resilient and sustainable agrifood systems.
The new policy known as ‘Recipes for success 2, policy innovations to achieve the Kampala Declaration goals’ brings out lessons from 70 country case studies.
Dr. Ousmane Badiane, Co-Chair, Malabo Montpellier Panel said that the Kampala declaration is an ambitious framework aimed at boosting the continent’s agrifood systems transformation.
“The good news is that African countries already possess a rich foundation of policy innovations, institutional reforms, and programmatic successes to build on,” Dr. Badiane said in a statement.
He noted that the evidence from the Panel’s work over nearly a decade shows that the success of the Kampala era would largely depend on Africa’s capacity to learn from documented experiences and scale up proven solutions through coordinated and sustained action.
According to Prof. Joachim von Braun, Co-Chair, Malabo Montpellier Panel at the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, the wealth of evidence in this report serves as a practical reference for African governments.
Prof. Braun further noted that development partners, and private-sector actors also stand to benefit to advance the ambitions of the Kampala Declaration.
He observed that the African research communities will play a key role providing guidance to implementation actions at continental and country level.
The experts noted that these policy solutions, along with robust communication and advocacy strategies, can serve as a blueprint for continentwide implementation, scaling, and monitoring to accelerate impact in the process of implementing phase of the Kampala Declaration.
Launched in 2003, the CAADP is the foundational framework for Africa’s agricultural development. It followed the endorsement of the Maputo Declaration which committed African nations to invest at least 10% of their national budgets in agriculture.
In 2014, renewed commitments under the Malabo Declaration were made. They set forth seven commitments to be achieved by 2025.
The commitments included ending hunger in Africa by 2025, halving poverty through inclusive agricultural growth, and enhancing the resilience of livelihoods and production systems to climate variability and other related risks.
Even though Africa has experienced sustained economic growth over the last two decades, with a steady increase in agricultural production, the continent has also faced severe setbacks on equal measure from climate shocks, the COVID-19 pandemic, and global commodity market disruptions linked to the Russia-Ukraine war.
The Kampala Declaration and the associated CAADP Strategy and Action Plan (2026–2035) that were adopted by African Union Member States in 2025, in Kampala, Uganda, proposed a holistic agrifood systems approach to shape the next decade of Africa’s agrifood system transformation.
With case studies from 22 countries and lessons from Regional Economic Communities, ‘Recipes for Success 2’ maps the Panel’s body of evidence against the six commitments outlined in the Kampala Declaration.
With this report, the Malabo Montpellier Panel presents an integrated agenda to support policy and programmatic interventions across areas such as agrifood finance, agro-processing, climate resilience, digitalization, fisheries, irrigation, mechanization, nutrition, and youth and women’s empowerment.
According to the experts, the Malabo Montpellier Panel presents a synthesis of proven lessons on the ground to boost agricultural productivity, accelerate agrifood processing and trade, expand innovative finance mechanisms, improve food security and nutrition, advance economic equity, and build resilience to climate-related and economic shocks across Africa.
The Kampala CAADP declaration will come into effect on January 1, 2026 and includes six key commitments to improve food and nutrition security, agricultural livelihoods and the resilience of food systems.
