Africa’s Agribusiness Opportunity: Pavel Slavkov on Why Food Systems Investment Is Accelerating
Investment in African agriculture and food systems is accelerating, driven by a combination of pressures that rarely align this cleanly: food security, climate resilience, and youth employment are all pointing investors toward the same sector at the same time.
Pavel Slavkov, a CEO who has watched capital shift toward agribusiness over the past several years, says the timing is not a coincidence. “Food systems investment used to be treated as a development issue rather than a commercial one,” he says. “That thinking has changed. The returns are commercial now, and the impact happens to come with them.”
A Continent That Still Imports Too Much of its Own Food
The scale of the underlying problem remains stark. Africa imports more than $40 billion worth of food annually, and the African Development Bank has warned that figure could climb toward $110 billion by 2030 if the structural inefficiencies in production, storage, and distribution that drive it are not addressed.
“Every dollar spent importing food that could have been grown locally is a dollar that leaves the continent and takes a job with it,” Pavel Slavkov says. “Investors are starting to see that gap as an opportunity rather than just a statistic.”
Twenty Years of Dialogue, And a Shift Toward Execution
That shift in framing was visible at the AFS Forum 2026 Summit in Kigali, which brought together policymakers, entrepreneurs, and investors to discuss food systems transformation, marking twenty years of continental dialogue on agricultural development. Two decades of conversation is a long runway, and Slavkov is candid about what that says.
“Twenty years of dialogue without proportionate investment would normally be a warning sign,” he says. “What’s different now is that the dialogue has started producing actual capital deployment, not just communiqués.”
Financing vehicles are backing that shift. AgDevCo’s 2026 Agribusiness Financing Opportunity is providing multi-million dollar debt and equity financing to growth-stage agribusinesses across Sub-Saharan Africa, targeting companies capable of driving sustainable transformation within local food systems. It is precisely the kind of patient, structured capital that agribusiness has historically struggled to attract, most financing in the sector has traditionally been short-term and poorly suited to agriculture’s slower production cycles.
What Technology is Already Delivering
The evidence that this capital is working is measurable. Africa’s 280 agritech startups raised a collective $1.2 billion in funding in 2023, and the results from that investment have been concrete rather than speculative: technology-assisted firms have seen yields rise by 32 percent, input costs fall by 28 percent, and water usage drop by 35 percent.
“Those aren’t projections. Those are results firms are already reporting,” Pavel Slavkov says. “When a sector shows that kind of return on a relatively modest technology investment, it stops being a story about potential and starts being a story about proof.”
Why the Labour Numbers Matter as Much as the Capital
Agriculture employs over half of Africa’s labour force and contributes a meaningful share, on most estimates somewhere around 15 percent, of the continent’s GDP. That combination is exactly what makes investment in the sector both commercially attractive and structurally important: few industries touch this many livelihoods while still operating this far below their productive potential.
For Slavkov, that is the real argument for agribusiness as an asset class in its own right, rather than a niche within broader emerging-markets investing. “You are rarely offered a sector this large, employing this many people, where the technology to close the productivity gap already exists and is already proven,” he says. “The agribusiness opportunity in Africa is not about betting on a turnaround. It’s about backing a transformation that measurable results say is already underway.”
That is, in the end, the case for the sector in a single line: for investors and entrepreneurs, the agribusiness opportunity lies in combining profitability with measurable impact on food security.
