Africa’s premier gathering on food systems opens in Dakar this week with the sense of a hinge moment. The Africa Food Systems Forum 2025, hosted under the leadership of Senegal’s President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, runs from August 31 to September 5 at the Centre International de Conférences Abdou Diouf (CICAD) in Diamniadio. Organisers say the summit will put Africa’s youth at the centre of an agenda that links climate resilience, nutrition, investment and trade to the continent’s economic future. Multiple partners confirm the dates, venue and youth-first theme, underscoring that this is the year actions are expected to catch up with rhetoric.
The mood is urgent because of the broader policy backdrop. In January, African heads of state adopted the Kampala CAADP Declaration and a new 2026–2035 strategy that sets the course for a decade of agrifood transformation, with fresh targets on finance, intra-African trade, productivity, and inclusion of women and young people. That framework was formally launched in May and now demands domestication in national plans; Dakar is where ministers, financiers and practitioners are expected to translate it into investments and reforms that stick.
Across the week, the program weaves big stages with highly practical spaces. Plenary discussions and ministerial roundtables will share the platform with a Youth Dome, a Knowledge Hub, and an Investment Room designed to move deals forward. The official synopsis highlights new report launches, masterclasses, and a Senegal Pavilion showcasing local solutions, from regenerative production to market and policy innovations, meant to ground lofty conversations in the realities of a fast-changing Sahelian economy.
If the summit’s slogan is collaboration, the Investment Room is its proof point. Organisers trail a crowded pipeline: 11 African countries will present priority opportunities while more than 70 small and medium enterprises pitch for capital to investors and development partners. The set-up is intentionally matchmaking, aimed at closing financing gaps that have long slowed scale. Attendance is expected to exceed 6,000 delegates, an indicator of how the forum has matured into the continent’s default marketplace for policy, capital and ideas.
Country spotlights will be a running thread. Ghana arrives with political tailwinds after launching “Feed Ghana” in April, a flagship push to raise domestic production, cut the import bill and create jobs through agro-industrialisation. Officials will use the “Ghana Deal Room” to court partners for irrigation, mechanisation, inputs and value-addition, signalling how Accra intends to align a presidential priority with CAADP’s new decade. The government has framed Feed Ghana as the centrepiece of its Agriculture for Economic Transformation Agenda; Dakar is its stage to show bankable projects.
Mali, meanwhile, is expected to emphasise youth enterprise and private-sector growth aligned with the continental 2063 vision, using the forum’s convening power to deepen regional integration around trade and inputs. That message, heard across West Africa’s reformers, fits a summit that treats cross-border collaboration as a competitive advantage rather than an afterthought.
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Expect science and technology to loom large, but not as buzzwords. On Day 0, partners led by SNV convene a session on how nutrition policy can protect and evolve traditional food systems under climate stress, an explicit attempt to avoid the false choice between indigenous diets and modernization. The program also features ICIPE’s showcase on youth-led insect innovations, reflecting how alternative proteins and circular bioeconomies are moving from pilot to policy conversation. These sit alongside sessions on public incentives for soil health, risk management and climate insurance, signaling a practical tilt: the toolbox for adaptation is diversifying and the forum wants to accelerate adoption.
Deals and financing have their own arc. Heifer International will host a half-day Deal Room session under the banner of “Powering Agricultural Transformation in Africa with Disruptive Technology,” bringing catalytic funders and innovators into direct conversation with governments. The design reflects a broader pivot from donor-led projects to blended finance and locally led growth, a theme many investors and agripreneurs will test in one-to-one meetings throughout the week.
The forum’s cultural and culinary layers are not decoration; they are part of the thesis that food systems are about people, tastes and livelihoods as much as inputs and yields. The Culinary Village will spotlight lost and forgotten crops, fortification and whole grains, while the “Arbre à Palabres” stage invites chefs, youth and innovators to treat breakthroughs as stories as well as spreadsheets. By staging this alongside a live podcast studio, a Youth Innovation competition, and a Senegal Pavilion of case studies, the organisers are betting that storytelling can speed diffusion of solutions as surely as any communique.
Awards nights provide the week’s emotional tempo. The Africa Food Prize, the GoGettaz youth entrepreneurship competition and AGRA’s VALUE4HER Women Agripreneurs of the Year Awards (WAYA) all land in Dakar, with WAYA finalists already named from a field of nearly 2,000 applications across 44 countries. Beyond recognition, these ceremonies tend to act as investor due-diligence shortcuts; founders who emerge with trophies often leave with term sheets.
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What to watch over the next few days is whether the forum can knit together its moving parts, policy, capital and science, around measurable commitments. The Kampala CAADP agenda will feature in parliamentarian dialogues focused on budgeting and oversight, with a push for 10 percent of public expenditure to be steered to agrifood systems and for new trade, energy and climate policies to be stress-tested for youth and gender impacts. If those conversations produce concrete roadmaps and funding, the continent would have a fighting chance to reduce food-price volatility, crowd in private investment and create dignified jobs, particularly for young women who are often locked out of land, finance and training.
Dakar has hosted many summits, but this one arrives with a sharper edge. Record numbers of young Africans are demanding decent work and affordable food. Governments, development banks and companies have been handed a continental plan and a public mandate. The question now is delivery: can the summit’s deal rooms, youth stages and policy forums move from promises and pilot projects to pipelines and scale? Over the next week, the answer will be measured less by speeches than by signed term sheets, launched platforms, and, in time, the price of a market basket from Saint-Louis to Sikasso. The forum bills itself as the place where collaboration, innovation and implementation meet; Dakar will test whether those three words can finally belong in the same sentence.
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