The African Development Bank (AfDB) has called for a shift from planning to execution in West Africa’s rice sector, warning that the region’s annual $3.5 billion rice import bill is straining foreign exchange reserves and represents a “missed opportunity” for domestic industrialization and job creation.
Richard Kwaku Ofori-Mante, the bank’s Director of Agricultural Finance and Rural Development, told participants at the West Africa Rice Investment Roundtable that the region imports nearly 12 million metric tons of rice each year despite having “abundant agricultural land, expanding markets, growing private sector interest, and critically, a young and dynamic population capable of driving transformation.”
“The question before us is no longer whether the opportunity exists,” Ofori-Mante said. “The question is whether we are prepared to move from ambition to execution at scale.”
The roundtable, hosted by the Government of Ghana, ECOWAS, and the World Bank Group at Kempinski Hotel, brings together regional leaders, development partners, and private sector investors to mobilize financing for national and regional rice investment action plans. It follows the December 2024 ratification by ECOWAS Heads of State of a Regional Rice Roadmap (2025-2035) aimed at achieving rice self-sufficiency by 2035.
At the center of the AfDB’s strategy is the Regional West Africa Resilient Rice Value Chain Development Program, known as REWARD, a $680 million flagship initiative covering all 15 ECOWAS member countries. The program is designed to transform entire rice value chains from irrigation and seed systems to mechanization, aggregation, processing, logistics, and market systems.
The AfDB’s board has already approved close to $136 million for initial operations, including regional grants to ECOWAS and AfricaRice, as well as country projects in The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Côte d’Ivoire. Ghana, designated a “strategic anchor country” for implementation, received an $18.6 million grant from the African Development Fund just last week, he told. Ghana is also slated for financing under the bank’s 2026-2027 lending program.
“REWARD is not just about rice. It is about transformation at scale,” Ofori-Mante said. The program aims to close the rice supply gap, enhance food sovereignty, and build resilient food systems while creating opportunities for over one million farmers and supporting thousands of enterprises across the value chain, particularly for women and youth.
The AfDB has committed to mobilizing $10 billion toward Africa’s broader agricultural transformation agenda, a pledge made at the Dakar 2 Food Summit in January 2023, where more than 30 African heads of state gathered around the objective of transforming Africa into a food-sovereign and food-exporting continent.
Ofori-Mante identified the primary constraints facing the sector as access to affordable long-term financing, efficient irrigation systems, and competitive processing capacity—not lack of demand. To address this, the bank is advancing a proposed $200 million agro-input risk-sharing facility designed to de-risk lending to agro-input marketplaces and incentivize private sector participation.
He also cited the New African Financial Architecture for Development, or NAFAD, endorsed by the African Union in February 2026 under the leadership of AfDB President Sidi Ould Tah. NAFAD seeks to plug Africa’s financing gap by unlocking domestic savings, building continent-wide guarantee and shared-rate systems, and developing local capital markets.
“Africa’s agricultural transformation cannot be financed through traditional development assistance alone,” Ofori-Mante said. “We must mobilize private capital at scale and build long-term African financing ecosystems.”
He outlined five priorities to guide collective efforts: expanding large-scale irrigation systems, strengthening mechanization and productivity, investing in aggregation and agro-processing, mobilizing blended finance to crowd in private sector investment, and deepening regional market integration.
The roundtable represents what Ofori-Mante described as “exactly the shift we need, moving from fragmented projects to coordinated platforms that align policy, investment pipelines, partners, and capital around execution.”
