The Agriculture Record
Agriculture Sector Analysis · April 2026 · mdbreform.com
$8.0 Billion Committed to Agriculture in Africa. 62% of Committed Resources Below Satisfactory.
Scale Without Transformation — What AgriConnect Promises. What the IEG Record Shows.
Parminder Brar · Former World Bank Country Manager and Lead Governance Specialist · mdbreform.com · April 2026
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| 38% S+ by commitment |
$4.9bn Below Satisfactory in a decade |
0% DPF and PforR combined |
62% Committed resources below standard |
The World Bank has committed $8.0 billion to 98 IEG-rated Agriculture and Food projects in Sub-Saharan Africa between FY2015 and FY2026. Of this, $4.9 billion — 62 percent — went to projects that did not achieve Satisfactory development outcomes. By project count, 35 of 98 achieved Satisfactory — 35.7 percent. By commitment, $3.0 billion of $8.0 billion went to Satisfactory projects — 38.0 percent. Agriculture is one of the rare sectors where the commitment-weighted rate is slightly higher than the count rate, because several large projects (Nigeria Fadama III $250M, Kenya Climate Smart Agriculture $250M) achieved Satisfactory. The global Agriculture rate is 41.6 percent.
AgriConnect: Another Initiative Without a Baseline
The Bank’s AgriConnect initiative — launched at the 2025 Annual Meetings under the theme “Jobs, Agriculture, and Economic Growth” — pledges to double agribusiness investment to $9 billion per year and reach 200 million farmers by 2030. The Bank describes “a major shift from funding single projects to supporting entire economic ecosystems.” The IEG record shows that 62 cents of every dollar committed to agriculture in Africa went to projects that did not achieve their development objectives. AgriConnect does not cite the IEG baseline, does not reference IEG’s own agriculture evaluation, and does not explain what will be different this time. Initiatives that do not begin with the failure record are designed to repeat it.
DPF and PforR: Zero Satisfactory
DPF in agriculture: 2 projects, zero Satisfactory, $150 million. PforR: 2 projects, zero Satisfactory, $400 million. The alternative instruments the Bank is scaling up have not produced a single Satisfactory outcome in agriculture in Africa. Only IPF delivers — at 37.2 percent by count, 41 percent by commitment. The Bank’s strategy is to scale up PforR. The agriculture record says PforR does not work in this sector.
Five Countries, Zero Satisfactory
Africa regional (5 projects, $301 million), Tanzania (2 projects, $231 million — including the Agricultural Sector Development Project at $208M rated Unsatisfactory), DRC (2 projects, $230 million), Mozambique (3 projects, $145 million), Senegal (2 projects, $115 million). Combined: 14 projects, $1.0 billion, zero Satisfactory. DRC and Mozambique — both cited as AgriConnect priorities — have zero Satisfactory agriculture outcomes.
The Transport Connection
The Bank’s own May 2025 report found that 37 percent of African food is lost in transit. Transport adds 30 percent to final food costs. Food travels 4,000 km in 23 days. The transport portfolio that is supposed to fix this delivers 4 percent Satisfactory by commitment. Agriculture cannot succeed if the roads that connect farms to markets do not work. AgriConnect promises to transform smallholder agriculture and create 800,000 jobs in Senegal alone. Senegal’s transport record: 2 projects, zero Satisfactory, $289 million.
The Trend
FY2015–17: 8–12 percent Satisfactory across 29 projects and $1.9 billion. FY2024: 84.6 percent — a dramatic improvement. But FY2025 drops back to 20 percent on $951 million, suggesting the improvement may not be sustained. The question is whether FY2024 represents a genuine structural shift or a cohort effect.
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