Winners from the CGIAR Food Systems Accelerator’s first cohort of agribusinesses from East and Southern Africa have been announced. The program supports agribusinesses in their climate-smart solutions to the farmers that they work with within their supply chains as well as to the broader ecosystem.

“We thought of how we could attract more capital into agriculture. I think everybody agrees in both the private and public sectors that this is a priority that has a huge impact economically and socially. There are still some challenges however around catalyzing that finance, particularly from the private sector. This is because of the risks in agriculture around production coming from climate and other risks so we have developed an acceleration approach that has been adjusted to the agriculture sector to sort out that risk to help money flow into agriculture and this is the Food Systems Accelerator,” says Mercy Zulu-Hume, Food Systems Accelerator Programme Lead.