Ghana is using the Africa Food Systems Forum today (Wednesday 3rd September) to press a practical pitch: bring capital to rice mills, soy crushing plants, cold chains and tractor services so that local production can replace imports and employ young people.
At the Ghana Deal Room this Wednesday, Minister of Food and Agriculture Eric Opoku and Presidential Advisor Augustus “Goosie” Tanoh, are setting out targeted opportunities across rice, soybean, poultry and vegetable value chains and asking investors to move from interest to commitments. Opoku is walking through the Feed Ghana Programme, which is prioritizing mechanization, storage and processing to reduce post-harvest losses, while Tanoh is pitching the 24-Hour Economy as a roughly US$4-billion space for private investment in round-the-clock agribusiness and logistics.
Officials are making the case with data. Government and trade figures that are being cited at the session show domestic milled rice output running near one million tones while annual rice import needs are remaining large, recent reporting and USDA forecasts are pointing to imports between about 750,000 and 1,000,000 tones in some scenarios. Poultry imports are being cited at roughly 270,000 tones a year, and soybean production is sitting around 350–360,000 tones but with limited local crushing capacity for feed and oil. Those gaps are driving the Deal Room’s project list: mills, feed plants, refrigerated transport and storage.
Sustainability is entering the finance conversation in narrowly practical terms. Ghana is positioning its climate-smart agriculture plan, which is including drought-tolerant seed trials, weather services and regenerative practices, as the technical backbone that is lowering climate risk for investors. At the same time, organizers are showing post-harvest loss figures to argue that investment in storage and processing will deliver faster returns and smaller emissions per unit of food than expanding cultivated area. APHLIS estimates are being used in briefings to show rice losses near 12 percent and maize losses near 18 percent in recent years, signaling clear demand for drying, storage and handling capacity.
Mechanization is also being presented as a sustainability and productivity lever. Speakers are pointing out that much of Ghana’s smallholder work remains manual and that tractor density and access to affordable implements are limiting timely planting and harvest quality. Deal Room proposals are therefore including shared-service tractor fleets and “tractor-as-a-service” models intended to increase yields without expanding the cultivated footprint.
The youth angle is direct and business-facing. Delegates are stressing that with more than 60 percent of Ghana’s population under 25, agribusiness has to be pitched as a route to stable employment, not as an occasional grant. Forum speakers are citing programs such as Heifer International’s AYuTe NextGen, which they say has mobilized more than US$10 million, supported nearly 100 youth-led ventures, created about 23,000 jobs and reached some 3.5 million smallholder households, as models for combining catalytic finance and incubation. That proof-of-concept is being used to argue that Ghana’s young agri-preneurs can scale if they get working capital and market links.
Investors are responding with detailed questions about tariffs, off-take guarantees and blended-finance options. At the Deal Room, Ghanaian officials are offering a mix of policy clarity and project pipelines: government incentives tied to Feed Ghana, land-use mapping for processing hubs, and suggested viability-gap funding under the 24-Hour Economy framework to attract anchor investors. The pitch is framing Ghana as a hub to serve more than 350 million consumers in the ECOWAS market, a selling point organizers are emphasizing to justify scale investments.
Ghana is not the only country stepping onto the investment stage today. Inside the Investment Room at CICAD, the spotlight is rotating across a trio of national showcases designed to position Uganda, Nigeria and Zimbabwe alongside Senegal and Ghana as priority destinations for agribusiness capital.
Uganda opened the day with a session led by its Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries, putting forward opportunities in beef, dairy, coffee and animal feed. Later in the morning, Nigeria follows, with the National Agricultural Development Fund and TechnoServe outlining the country’s investment priorities in food systems. By the afternoon, attention is shifting to Zimbabwe, where Agriculture Minister Anxious Masuka is leading a presentation that stretches from maize, soy and sunflower to beef, dairy, poultry and blueberries.
These Legacy Programmes are being treated as flagship platforms rather than side events. For many watching in Dakar, their combined weight signals a shift in approach: governments are moving beyond broad policy statements and into the practical detail of bankable, sector-specific deals aimed squarely at investors.
The forum’s Wall of Pledges is making commitments visible in real time and prompting civil-society and donor representatives to ask how deals will be tracked against outcomes such as lower import bills, measurable cuts in post-harvest loss and higher smallholder incomes. Observers in Dakar are saying the real test will be whether letters-of-intent in the Deal Room are converting to financed projects and operational plants back in Ghana.
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For now, Ghana is using the forum to move the debate from abstract goals to bankable projects: mills, feed plants, cold chains and mechanization services that are being priced and scoped in front of potential financiers. The session is therefore shaping up less as a photo opportunity and more as an exercise in converting national policy packages into investor-ready propositions, and the outcome will be visible in whether investors are signing agreements before delegates leave Dakar.
