At an Innovation Hub session inside this year’s Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, a senior Rwandan energy official described a pattern he’d watched play out more than once. An irrigation scheme gets planned, designed and built by the responsible agriculture authorities. Only once it is ready to switch on does anyone ask how it will be powered. His side of government is rarely brought in before that point, he said. Not during planning, not during design, not during construction. By the time the call comes, there is nothing left to do but scramble.
Preparing for that same session, Kenya’s lead official for agriculture planning under the continental CAADP framework noted that a similar disconnect was clearly visible in her own ministry’s planning.
Two countries. Two sides of the same divide, saying the same thing from opposite directions: energy and agriculture are still not planned together, and the people meant to prevent that gap find out too late.
That exchange is harder to excuse precisely because the institutional will is no longer in question. The Forum’s organisers put energy into the main plenary programme and into a closed ministerial roundtable built around the energy access crisis. The Innovation Hub conversation happened because GOGLA and partners under the Agri-Energy Coalition built it with the same intent. Energy is now written into the language of Africa’s biggest agriculture gathering in a way it wasn’t a few years ago.
And that’s the problem. The people setting strategy have already decided that energy belongs in the agriculture conversation, but the people doing the planning are still discovering the connection at the last minute. We heard versions of the same admission from technical-level officials all week. Several said they now see the gap and intend to close it. Almost none could point to a process or a requirement that would make consulting the other side automatic.
What hasn’t happened is the harder work of building that conclusion into how planning actually gets done, on the ground, before the scheme is built.
Farmers, smallholders and the development professionals closest to them hear the word “energy” and largely do not see themselves in it. It sounds like an add-on rather than a solution.
That’s despite the fact that off-grid solar already powers irrigation pumps, cold storage and processing equipment for farmers and small businesses across the continent. What those farmers and business owners bought was not electricity. It was a pump that works when the rains fail, cold storage that keeps milk sellable, drying capacity that gets a harvest to market before it spoils.
We on the energy side need to leave our own bubble. Even the sessions built specifically to close this gap tend to start with the systems and reach the people last. Technology, financing structures and policy asks come first. Ayoola Dominic, a solar-cooling entrepreneur on the Innovation Hub stage, said as much about his own sector: the policy conversation begins at the panel and the platform, some distance from the small business owner deciding whether her shop opens tomorrow. A farmer does not need to understand renewable energy to benefit from it. She needs what it enables to arrive in a form she recognises: less spoilage, a fuller till, one fewer trip to a diesel facility that may not be working when she gets there.
None of this is solved by asking people to collaborate more or to speak a gentler language. Coordination has been requested at every one of these forums for years, and it keeps arriving as a request rather than a requirement.
That can change right now. The CAADP Strategy and Action Plan 2026 to 2035, adopted by African Heads of State in January 2025, commits members to raising agrifood output by 45 per cent, halving post-harvest losses, tripling intra-African agrifood trade and mobilising USD 100 billion. National investment plans must reflect those commitments by 2028, and the first biennial review under the new framework reports in that same year. The plans are being written now.
Energy appears in the action plan under agro-processing, under investment priorities, under rural infrastructure, and under resilience, where the strategy explicitly calls for solar-powered irrigation and renewable energy for post-harvest processing, storage and cooking.
But the CAADP Implementation Guidelines omit energy altogether. The inter-ministerial coordination platform is specified as Agriculture, Finance, Planning, Trade, Environment and Health. The team that drafts the national investment plan is specified as Agriculture, Finance, Planning and Trade. Energy appears in neither list.
The Guidelines also cut more than 50 Biennial Review indicators into 22 core targets, each of which can be met on paper without a country stating how any of it will be powered.
Which brings us back to the government officials on stage in Kigali. They are not describing a failure of the process. They are describing the process. When continental guidance names four ministries for the planning team and energy is not among them, the late phone call is the predictable result rather than the exception.
The fix is straightforward and the window is narrow. As governments revise their national agrifood systems investment plans before 2028, energy belongs in the indicators, not just the narrative.
Governments are not the only ones with work to do. The same mismatch runs through agricultural and energy financiers, and through the DFIs and MDBs whose mandates already cover both sides of it. The Agri-Energy Coalition sets out what each of them can do in a 5-part plan for action.
And the reverse must hold with equal force. Once energy is written in, it cannot be counted the way it usually is, by megawatts pledged and conferences convened. It has to be judged by what it delivers to the person it was meant for. Whether the pump ran when the rains failed. Whether the cold storage kept the milk sellable. Whether the processor could finally compete.
This year’s Africa Food Systems Forum showed that leaders no longer need convincing that energy belongs in this conversation. What has yet to be built are the structures that make that belief show up automatically, before the scheme is designed, in a budget line, and in a result a farmer can feel. It is a design problem, and design problems are solvable.
The Agri-Energy Coalition’s five-point action plan sets out what governments, financiers and industry can each do next. GOGLA will take this agenda into the Global Off-Grid Solar Forum and Expo in Kigali, 27 to 29 October 2026.
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