Greetings from Addis Ababa, where I’ll spend the next few days reporting from this year’s African Union Summit in Ethiopia. More to come on the meetings, the mood, and what’s rising to the top of leaders’ agendas.
What the continent must do — and can do — in the face of shrinking official development assistance will no doubt be part of the conversation. Last month, the African Union issued a statement on the United States’ decision to cut funding to multilateral organizations, warning that the move could undermine development gains, peace, and resilience.
One place where that impact shows up clearly is food and agriculture. When the Trump administration issued a stop-work order of U.S. foreign aid projects last year, Freda Asem, an agricultural economist with the University of Ghana, was in the middle of field trials across West Africa she had spent years building toward.
Asem was also the coordinator of the West Africa hub for USAID’s Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Horticulture at the University of California, Davis, which was forced to shut down as well. Field plots across West Africa were already planted and crops were beginning to mature. Researchers were tracking the growth of indigenous fruits and vegetables — ranging from okra to the African tamarind fruit — hoping to make the case for why these often sidelined crops mattered for nutrition and deserved more attention and investment.
With the stop-work order, there was no wind-down. Trials underway could not be finished. For Asem, it was a “tragedy.” She says she has not gone back to the abandoned fields — and would not want to. It would be too painful to see years of work cut short.
“Just millions of dollars wasted,” says Erin McGuire, who led the UC Davis lab until USAID’s downfall.
But rather than wait to see whether the program would return, McGuire and former colleagues launched Responsible Innovations — an effort to preserve the work, relationships, and expertise built under Feed the Future, even as federal funding disappeared.
The concept behind Responsible Innovations is that food systems solutions need to be “responsible” — not making existing problems worse, not reinforcing inequality, and not creating new risks as ideas move from pilots to scale. The organization is a lean operation: a core team of five, a group of around 10 experts brought in for specific projects, and a wider network of roughly 50 specialists from around the world. Asem is now one of those experts.
For McGuire, the goal is not to recreate what was lost, but to build from it — keeping people and knowledge connected. “We’re creating a platform for experts that might otherwise be geographically siloed to work together and submit proposals together,” she says. “The idea is that we are stronger together.”
For researchers like Asem, it’s a way to keep years of work, collaboration, and locally led expertise from disappearing entirely — even as the system that once supported them shifts.
Read: When Feed the Future shut down, these researchers built something new (Pro)
If the Feed the Future shutdown shows how years of agricultural research can be cut off midseason, Uganda offers a glimpse of what the same disruption looks like for farmers.
In western Uganda, hundreds of smallholder farmers who had begun cultivating moringa — a drought-resistant, nutrient-rich crop with growing export potential — have been forced to abandon it. The shift followed the collapse of a USAID-backed income support program that provided modest monthly payments while moringa production ramped up.
For farmers such as Tefuro Ezua, the program offered something rare: steady cash flow. The payments helped cover school fees and farm costs and reduced the need to borrow. But the money arrived unevenly, then stopped altogether after nine months — well short of what participants had been promised. By early 2025, with no clarity on whether U.S. support would resume, Ezua uprooted his moringa trees and replanted sugarcane.
“My plans were ruined when the money stopped coming after nine months, yet I was told I would be getting it for two years,” he tells Devex.
Around 250 farmers were affected when the program ended, according to Raintree Farms, the Ugandan company implementing the project. Once moringa supply increased, the company planned to take over payments through commercial sales. Instead, the funding stopped first — and supply collapsed with it.
Read: US aid cuts uproot Uganda’s emerging ‘miracle tree’ market
+ This story is part of The Aid Report, Devex’s new editorial and data project tracking how U.S. foreign aid cuts are reshaping programs and services on the ground. This editorially independent journalism is funded by the Gates Foundation. If your organization has data or examples of how programs and people are being affected, whether positively or negatively, please email editor Kelli Rogers at kelli.rogers@devex.com. You can also reach Kelli securely on Signal or fill out this short survey.
While U.S. support for agriculture is pulling back, the World Bank is moving in the opposite direction — with jobs as the headline goal and agriculture increasingly central to how it plans to deliver them.
That push is being channeled through the bank’s AgriConnect initiative, launched in October at the bank’s annual meetings, which is designed to double the bank’s agribusiness investments to $9 billion a year by 2030.
This week brought a major update: Senegal became the first country to launch an AgriConnect compact with the bank, putting it at the front of the bank’s list of first movers as the initiative shifts from design to execution. Senegal’s compact focuses on grains, horticulture, and livestock, with targets that include boosting national food security above 90% by 2029 and creating 800,000 formal jobs across the agricultural sector.
The rollout illustrates how AgriConnect is being delivered — through country-owned compacts in which governments define priorities and policy reforms up-front, creating clearer pipelines for investment. “The compacts are a game-changer,” World Bank Managing Director of Operations Anna Bjerde told me last week. “Which is why, on AgriConnect, we’re looking to launch close to 40 compacts over the next few weeks.”
Read: Country compacts are a 'game-changer' for World Bank, says Anna Bjerde (Pro)
And don’t miss: Inside the World Bank’s plan to boost jobs by investing in agribusiness
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The International Fund for Agricultural Development’s Governing Council meetings are underway this week in Rome, with the first consultations on the fund’s next replenishment set to begin tomorrow. A second round of discussions will take place before the summer, with clearer funding scenarios to follow, IFAD President Alvaro Lario told reporters yesterday.
The bar is already high. The last cycle, IFAD13, was the fund’s largest replenishment to date. “It was approximately $1.7 billion, out of which $1.4 [billion] was in terms of grants and $300 million approximately in terms of concessional loans,” Lario said. Still, he framed that record round not as a peak but as a starting point. “So for us, that’s the base we would like to build on.”
Beyond donor pledges, Lario signaled other changes in its next cycle. “What I can also already anticipate is that we will be also aiming to increase our cofinancing,” he said, pointing to closer collaboration with private-sector players and financial institutions.
That emphasis was underscored by the fact that Lario shared the floor with Nigerian banker and philanthropist Tony Elumelu.
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As a banker, Elumelu said, regulatory and collateral requirements make it difficult for large banks to lend to smallholders, leaving governments and development finance institutions with a central role in de-risking capital for rural economies. Separately, he pointed to the role of philanthropy, noting that through the Tony Elumelu Foundation, $100 million has been committed to backing young African entrepreneurs. More than 24,000 of those entrepreneurs have been supported to date, around half of them women and roughly 21% operating in agriculture and agribusiness.
Background: How IFAD issued $1 billion in sustainable bonds
See also: As aid budgets shrink, how did support for this UN agency grow? (Pro)
50%
—Climate change could slash the amount of land suitable for livestock by up to half by 2100. This could impact more than 100 million pastoralists, according to a study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Africa is particularly vulnerable: Grasslands on the continent could be reduced by 16% in a low-emission scenario, or up to 65% in a future in which fossil fuels continue to expand.
Small farms contribute a third of the food consumed in high-income nations. [Nature]
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s reputation as the gold standard for agricultural data is under strain, amid deep staff losses and a major revision to its corn estimates. [Reuters]
What kind of leader does the World Health Organization need next? [Devex Pro]