What the Region Already Knows, and What It Has Yet to Fund

Aug 18, 2026 | CEO's Blog

Dr. Tshilidzi Madzivhandila, Chief Executive Officer and Head of Mission, FANRPAN

On Monday 17 August 2026, Heads of State and Government met at the Durban International Convention Centre for the 46th Ordinary Summit of the Southern African Development Community, under the theme of resilient, sustainable and inclusive industrialisation through infrastructure development, agricultural and critical minerals transformation. Three days earlier, in the same city, FANRPAN and our partners convened a High-Level Policy Dialogue on one part of that theme, the transformation of Southern Africa’s food systems.

I want to record what came out of that day, because it did not produce a wish list. It produced a diagnosis. The region is not short of policy. It is short of instruments.

Start with the scale. SADC’s own Regional Vulnerability Assessment Programme puts more than 40 million people in this region food insecure every year over the past five years, and almost 19 million children stunted, one in every three. Those are not crisis numbers. They are the baseline. The crisis numbers are worse. When El Niño arrived in 2023 and 2024, SADC launched a regional humanitarian appeal on 20 May 2024 for at least US$5.5 billion, citing more than 61 million people affected.

Another El Niño is now forecast. The World Meteorological Organization said on 31 July that the event will intensify into a strong one during August to October, with sea surface temperature anomalies expected to exceed 2.9 degrees in the key monitoring regions. The United States Climate Prediction Center placed the Pacific under an El Niño Advisory on 9 July, with an 81 per cent chance of a very strong event between October and December.

So the question our Dialogue put was not whether the region understands the risk. It plainly does. The question was why the response keeps arriving after the damage.

The answer given, in different rooms and by different institutions, was the same. A plan sits outside the budget process until it is financed. FAO’s framing presentation put it most directly. Southern Africa has developed a substantial body of policies, strategies and investment plans, and the difficulty is not their design. Transformation is driven by instruments rather than by strategies alone. The South African Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development made the same point from the position of a Member State, that the continent makes declarations and does not consistently implement them. The SADC Secretariat, opening the Dialogue, noted that commitments made a decade ago remain with us still.

I make this point now, and not in a month, because three items before the Summit are precisely where instruments are needed.

The Regional Development Fund

Heads of State will consider the operationalisation of the SADC Regional Development Fund. The Committee of Ministers of Finance and Investment has endorsed its establishment as a standalone special purpose vehicle with a permanent capital structure, to be delivered in stages from a proof of concept phase, and has repeated the call for Member States that have not signed or ratified the Agreement to do so. Our Dialogue spent a substantial part of the morning on what a dedicated agrifood financing mechanism looks like when it is working. Morocco’s poultry sector agreement, delivered through its Agricultural Development Fund, drew US$326 million of private investment against US$76 million of public money, better than four to one. Eswatini has established an Agricultural Development Fund with named instruments, including a credit risk guarantee facility absorbing 30 per cent of losses. Zambia and Eswatini have both completed instrument-based national agrifood systems investment plans. These are not proposals. Two of them are inside SADC.

Disaster preparedness

The Summit will consider strengthening the SADC Humanitarian and Emergency Operations Centre at Nacala in Nampula Province. Our session on soil health made an argument that belongs alongside that discussion. When the last El Niño arrived, the region appealed for US$5.5 billion after the damage, while the finance arranged in advance was a small fraction of that. Preparedness that activates only on a disaster declaration is not preparedness. Soil health is the one measure on that list which pays whether or not the drought arrives, because healthy soil holds water when the rain fails and converts it when the rain comes. It belongs in a resilience budget before the season, not in an appeal after it. The instruments exist. Ministers meeting in Victoria Falls in May approved the memorandum of understanding on harmonising fertiliser regulatory frameworks and named the SADC Soil Health and Fertilizer Hub and the national hubs as the primary coordination and implementation entities for this work. The Hub itself was launched in Johannesburg in August 2025, at FANRPAN’s annual policy dialogue.

Agricultural transformation and industrialisation

Our session on indigenous and underutilised crops made an argument more sharply than I have heard it made. These crops are underfunded rather than under-evidenced. SADC frameworks already name their value in functional foods, nutraceuticals and plant based products, and research allocation has not followed. Meanwhile the science connecting them to nutrition and health outcomes is being built and commercialised outside the continent, while the continent holds the diversity. If industrialisation is the Summit’s theme, this is among the clearest industrial opportunities the region is not yet financing.

One figure from the day has stayed with me above the rest. SADC holds roughly 2,300 cubic kilometres of renewable water each year and an estimated 50 million hectares of irrigation potential, and irrigates between 3.5 and 4 million hectares of it, less than 10 per cent. Nearly 90 per cent of our agricultural production depends on rainfall that is becoming less reliable. The constraint is not water. It is storage, financing, governance and institutional capacity. That is an infrastructure question, and infrastructure development is in the Summit’s theme.

The continental commitments are already in place. The Nairobi Declaration of May 2024 committed governments to restoring soil health on at least 30 per cent of degraded soils by 2034 and to tripling domestic fertilizer production over the same period. The Kampala CAADP Declaration, adopted in January 2025, and the CAADP Strategy and Action Plan 2026 to 2035 set the frame for the decade. Nothing said in Durban asked for a new framework.

FANRPAN convened this Dialogue with the SADC Secretariat and partners across government, research, farmer organisations, philanthropy and civil society. I say that deliberately, because the value of a policy network is not in holding a view of its own. It is in carrying the evidence that national institutions generate into the rooms where regional decisions are taken. Our national policy nodes work in seventeen countries, and the Secretariat’s task is to turn what they find into positions that regional and continental institutions can act on.

Those recommendations now travel to the Summit. I would put the test simply. A year from now the question will not be whether the region agreed. It will be whether a Member State can point to a budget line, an instrument, and an entity accountable for it. That is a harder test than a communiqué, and it is the one worth setting.

The rains will come, or they will not. What we decide before them is the part we control.

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