By Gabriel Ewepu and Progress Godfrey

ABUJA — AN agribusiness firm African Food Changemakers (AFC) has called for stronger collaboration with government institutions to scale support for agri-food small and medium enterprises, SMEs, across Africa, citing the critical role of entrepreneurs in driving food security, innovation and resilience on the continent.

The call was made by the Executive Chair of the AFC, Temi Adegoroye, on Thursday, during the organisation’s annual ‘End of Year Entrepreneur Mixer’, a platform designed to celebrate and connect agri-food entrepreneurs operating across the food value chain.

Adegoroye explained that the initiative was created to shine a spotlight on the often-unseen contributions of agri-food SMEs, noting that while attention is frequently focused on large corporations, small and medium businesses are the real drivers of Africa’s food systems.

He explained that AFC was established to provide agri-food entrepreneurs with access to networks, information, funding opportunities and policy engagement needed to grow and scale their businesses across African markets.

“It is to celebrate entrepreneurs in the ecosystem and really make some noise around the impact of the work, the silent work that they are doing”, Adegoroye said.

According to him, African Food Changemakers currently has about 9,000 active members spread across 49 African countries, with a long-term goal of building a community of one million agri-food entrepreneurs on the continent.

He noted that the organisation runs targeted programmes to address key challenges facing the sector, including climate resilience and export expansion, while also facilitating peer-to-peer learning among entrepreneurs across borders.

He further said, “We believe that if we create a community of entrepreneurs where all of them can meet, connect, many problems will be solved.

“Sometimes it’s not just about lack of access to finance, it’s really just that you need a cassava processor in Nigeria, probably you need another cassava processor in Kenya or Tanzania, to learn from them.”