‘Our aim is to provide jobs for 25m youths by 2025’
Jennifer Blanke is the Vice-President, Agriculture, Human and Social Development at the African Development Bank (AfDB). In this interview, she speaks on the seventh African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), taking place in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, how to mitigate the impact of climate change on agriculture, the bank’s Feed Africa Strategy, and other key issues.
What are the goals of the AGRF-AfDB partnership?
The African Development Bank’s Feed Africa Strategy is to transform African agriculture over the next decade into a competitive and inclusive agribusiness sector that creates wealth, improves lives and secures the environment. The goals of Feed Africa are to help eliminate extreme poverty in Africa by 2025, end hunger and malnutrition in Africa by 2025, make Africa a net food exporter, and move Africa to the top of export-oriented global value chains where it has comparative advantage.
For its part, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) focuses on catalysing smallholder farmer productivity to unleash agricultural transformation by using an integrated value chain approach, with an emphasis on staple crops.
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