Agriculture Isn’t a “Sector.” It’s the Entire Economy.

By Sheena Raikundalia

When policymakers speak of agriculture as a “sector,” they reveal the limits of their imagination. A sector is a slice. Agriculture is the substrate – the foundation beneath every economy that pretends it has moved beyond the soil.

Recently, moderating the press launch for the third FINAS (Financing Agriculture Sustainably) conference, that distinction felt more urgent than ever.
Here is what the room made clear.

Governments Are Finally Showing Up – All of Them

For the first time at FINAS, the Ministry of Agriculture was not alone at the table. Representatives from ICT and Trade were present, too.

That may sound like a procedural footnote. It is not.

Siloed ministries have long been one of the most reliable enemies of agricultural transformation in Africa. When the people who govern digital infrastructure and the people who govern trade sit alongside those who govern food production, the policy conversation changes – in tone, in scope, and eventually, one hopes, in outcome. The “whole-of-government” approach is no longer an aspiration.

It is, slowly, becoming practice.

Accountability Is Becoming the New Normal

Previous FINAS conferences have been criticized, as many such gatherings are, for generating momentum without consequence. This year, partners returned not merely to attend but to report – on commitments made, on progress delivered, on gaps that remain.

Accountability in a room full of people who are used to making pledges without being asked to honor them is, in itself, a radical act. If this becomes the standard rather than the exception, it will matter far more than any single financing instrument announced from a podium.

The Risk Debate Is the Wrong Debate

The perennial argument over whether agriculture is genuinely high-risk or merely perceived to be resurfaced, as it always does. The more useful answer emerging from the conference was this: capital exists.

The question is structure. Risk in agricultural lending is often less a function of the underlying economics than of the absence of the right financial architecture – blended finance, patient capital, de-risking instruments, and government guarantees that allow private money to move. Challenging the narrative that food security is a gamble is not naive optimism. It is a prerequisite for unlocking the investment Africa’s agricultural systems need.

The K-Curve Is a Crisis With a Name

One of the conference’s sharper analytical contributions was what participants called the “K-Curve” – the diverging trajectories of rising food demand and falling soil productivity. The two lines are moving in opposite directions, and the space between them is where hunger lives.

What made the discussion notable was how insistently climate entered a conversation nominally about finance. The two cannot be disentangled. Worth noting: Kenya’s Constitution already enshrines the right to a clean and healthy environment for current and future generations.

The legal framework exists. The political will to act on it remains the variable.

Data Is Not the New Oil. Hoarded Data Is Stale Oil.

The comparison of data to oil has become a cliché precisely because it is almost right. Oil unrefined is inert. Data unshared is worse – it degrades.

Every institution in the agricultural finance space is sitting on datasets that could, in combination with others, generate genuine insight. In isolation, they generate competitive advantage for no one and actionable intelligence for everyone who needs it.

Without shared, dynamic, and actionable data, every conversation about artificial intelligence in agriculture is noise dressed as strategy.

There is a deeper data problem, too – one less often named. Africa’s traditional farming knowledge: its indigenous crop varieties, soil practices, seasonal rhythms, and community land wisdom – is being lost.

If it is not preserved and encoded before the AI era fully arrives, it will be invisible to the systems that are being built to feed the next generation. That knowledge is not a relic. It is irreplaceable intellectual capital.

On Collaboration: Name Where You Compete

There is a productive honesty available to this sector that it rarely permits itself. Organizations compete – for donor funding, for government attention, for the credibility that comes with being seen as the lead actor in a given space.

That is not shameful. It is human. What is damaging is the pretense that collaboration is the default when, in practice, it is the exception.

The more useful discipline is specificity: name where you compete, name where you collaborate, and then actually do the second one. Vague commitments to partnership produce vague results.

The 19-Year-Old Is the Market

Kenya’s median age is 19. Across sub-Saharan Africa, the story is similar. This is not a demographic curiosity – it is the central economic fact of the continent’s agricultural future.

A young, growing population will require more food than any aging economy. And that population is not waiting to be handed a legacy system designed for someone else’s context.

Africa’s traditional crops, its indigenous practices, and its community-held land are not liabilities to be apologized for. They are the raw material of a new agricultural playbook – one that is community-driven, youth-led, and technology-enabled.

The geopolitical case for urgency is already written. COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz each demonstrated, in succession, how dependency on external food systems is a structural vulnerability, not merely a supply-chain inconvenience.

The response cannot be reactive. It must be deliberate, financed, and built by Africans, for Africa.

The money exists. The mandate is clear. What remains is the will to structure both – and the discipline to follow through.

Sheena Raikundalia is an accomplished entrepreneur, former lawyer, government policy advisor, and angel investor with deep expertise across the legal, financial services, and impact investment sectors in Europe and Africa. She has played a pivotal role in advancing Africa’s technology and innovation ecosystems, leveraging a career that spans top-tier London law firms, leadership as Country Director of the UK-Kenya Tech Hub for the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and her current position as Chief Growth Officer at agri-tech company Kuza One. Sheena is recognized for her strategic vision, commitment to fostering innovation, and strong advocacy for Africa’s growth potential in technology, entrepreneurship, and impact investment.