On 10–13 November 2025, donors at COP30 committed more than US$142 million to CGIAR to accelerate agricultural research and innovation for climate-resilient food systems, with the United Kingdom, Denmark, Belgium and Canada among the contributors; the funding is intended to translate research into tools and programmes that help countries set adaptation targets, measure progress under the Global Goal on Adaptation, and support smallholder farmers confronting greater droughts, pests and market shocks.
That cash injection has an immediate practical meaning for African agriculture. CGIAR, which operates in over 80 countries and employs roughly 9,000 staff, has for decades developed drought-tolerant seeds, climate-smart agronomy and landscape-management approaches now used by millions of farmers.
Read also: COP30 negotiations stall over finance: Africa calls for predictable, accessible climate support
The new pledges are aimed at scaling partner-led research to reduce emissions from agriculture while strengthening resilience in the places where yields and incomes are most fragile. Those aims matter because agriculture produces roughly one-third of the world’s food but attracts a disproportionately small share of climate finance: analyses tracking climate flows put finance directed at small-scale agriculture at about US$10 billion, roughly 1.7 percent of total tracked climate finance, leaving a vast gap between need and resources.
On the ground the gap looks like stalled projects and missed seasons. In the Sahel, for example, seed programmes that could deliver heat- and drought-tolerant varieties to tens of thousands of farmers require upfront investment in breeding, seed multiplication and distribution networks; without concessional grants or guarantees these activities struggle to attract commercial capital because returns are diffuse and seasonal.
In coastal West Africa, investments in salt-tolerant rice and mangrove restoration need long-term finance to deliver both food security and shoreline protection; donors and development partners repeatedly point to the same obstacle, a shortage of patient, non-debt funding that can absorb long lead times and uncertain revenue profiles. The COP30 pledges aim to fill parts of that financing architecture by backing evidence generation, monitoring systems and country-level technical support that make adaptation projects investible.
Private finance will be necessary to scale many solutions, but private money follows predictable risk-reward equations. This is where African financial institutions have started to matter.
For instance, Standard Bank, Africa’s largest lender by assets, has recently closed significant renewable and hybrid energy transactions and positioned itself as a strategic equity and financing partner for projects that combine public concessionality with commercial capital. Still, these successes are concentrated in larger markets; South Africa, Kenya and select West African economies, leaving fragile states and remote agricultural systems less well served.
Closing the adaptation finance gap therefore requires translating research funding into bankable transactions. CGIAR’s comparative advantage is evidence: the organization’s research packages, if paired with predictable grants and blended-finance mechanisms, can lower technical and revenue risk enough to crowd in institutional investors.
Read also: Malawi scales up water security as 5.6 million m³ Bwanje Dam becomes a climate resilience lifeline
Donors at COP30 emphasized this logic, arguing that investment in science yields measurable returns; CGIAR estimates a roughly tenfold benefit for every dollar invested in agricultural research, a point donors used to justify their commitments. But the macro picture remains daunting. Across Africa many projects are still too small, too localized or too early-stage for large institutional funds; transaction costs remain high and currency and sovereign risks deter long-tenor lending.
Policymakers and financiers must therefore move beyond single grants to practical instruments that bridge research and markets: concessional financing to underwrite pilot rollouts, guarantees that address currency and payment risks, and regional platforms that aggregate demand and create scale.
The World Bank and others are already advancing large-scale instruments for grid expansion and transmission that illustrate the point: attracting private capital for a US$25 billion transmission plan in South Africa requires credit guarantees and pooled junior capital to change the risk-return profile. Similar tools could, in principle, be adapted for networks of otherwise small agricultural investments across several countries, turning thousands of discrete interventions into investible programmes.
There is also a political economy to consider. Donor pledges at COP30 are meaningful, but predictable multi-year financing and streamlined access modalities are what allow ministries of agriculture and rural development to produce bankable project pipelines. Where CGIAR’s evidence is combined with clear procurement frameworks, simple revenue models for services like seed multiplication or pay-as-you-go irrigation, and capacity building in national research institutes, projects move faster. Where these elements are absent, even generous pledges risk becoming short-term programmes that do not shift structural resilience.
The recent pledges are a practical step. If those funds are deployed to scale proven innovations, paired with blended finance to bring in commercial partners and backed by banks able to underwrite complex transactions, they can catalyze wider flows.
Africa’s challenge is to ensure that the science financed at COP30 becomes the foundation for transactions that governments, local banks and investors can commit to for the long term, turning research into seed systems, into market contracts, into livelihoods that are less exposed to the next drought or pest outbreak. That is the test of whether this moment at COP30 changes the ledger for food security.
Engage with us on LinkedIn for more stories on COP30: Africa Sustainability Matters
