Welcome to African Green Revolution website!

It is overwhelmingly recognized that agricultural development is key to achieving broad-based economic growth and the Millennium Development Goals of poverty and hunger reduction in Africa.  Notwithstanding, the performance of the continent’s agriculture has been disappointing over many decades, resulting in increasing rural poverty, declining per capita food production, increasing food imports now estimated at US$ about 30 billion per year and rising food prices. Africa’s prospects for achieving internationally agreed development goals, such as the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, remain rather bleak.

Inadequacy of past approaches and solutions has been a major cause of the above situation. It has led to failure to produce tangible and sustained results, caused the Green Revolution to bypass Africa, was a major reason for the persistent hunger and extreme human misery on the continent.

The failure to build on past successful experiences has been an important aspect of the underlying inadequacy. Evidence is available which suggests that not all African efforts to achieve green revolution or sustainable rural transformation have been in vain. There have been pockets of successes or good practices, which were characterized by significant productivity increases in various parts of the continent.

Examples of these successes include production of tea in Kenya in the 1990s, cotton in Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Senegal in 19791981 and 19921993; maize, wheat, sorghum and teff in Ethiopia in the 1990s; New Rice for Africa (NERICA) in West Africa in recent years, maize in south Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in the 1930s and 1980s, and in Malawi in recent years. These examples suggest that many African countries may have good potential to achieve Sustainable Modernization of Agriculture and Rural Development (SMART) or Green Revolution that could help reduce significantly food insecurity and poverty. Further, recent encouraging shifts in attitude towards African agriculture and the movement that brought African agriculture back to prominence seem to underline African readiness to effect SMART.

The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) is organizing a training workshop on Sustainable Modernization of Agriculture and Rural Transformation (SMART)/ Green Revolution in order to review the necessary conditions for SMART