AFSF 2026: “Stop calling them beneficiaries” — Mastercard foundation, AGRA push bundled finance to unlock youth agribusiness

KIGALI, RWANDA — A decisive mindset shift reverberated through the Youth Dome at the ongoing Africa Food Systems Forum (AFSF) 2026: development partners and commercial financiers must immediately retire the practice of treating youth and women as charity beneficiaries and start backing them as the bankable commercial backbone of Africa’s agrifood future.
The charge was led by Sheila Kaaya, Lead for Agriculture and Agrifood Systems at the Mastercard Foundation, during an incisive panel on “Special Investment Programs for Youth and Women in Agrifood Systems.” Confronting the continent’s long-standing failure to channel private capital to young agripreneurs, Kaaya argued that fragmented interventions—dishing out a loan here, a training module there, and an insurance policy elsewhere—are systematically setting young producers up to fail.
“We have to reframe how we consider our young people,” Kaaya asserted, speaking to a packed room of policymakers, commercial lenders, and enterprise founders. “They are not beneficiaries. They are active participants, they are entrepreneurs, and they are the next private-sector actors driving this continent forward.”
Central to the discussion was the structural mismatch between how formal banks assess creditworthiness and how youth and women actually operate on the ground. According to insights shared from recent field implementations across the region, up to 69% of women access finance through informal mechanisms, not because they represent poor credit, but because formal underwriting algorithms fail to capture their footprints.
Kaaya pointed out that financial trust is often collective rather than individual. In an intervention with CARE in Uganda, project teams digitized savings group data—tracking regular group meeting attendance, savings discipline, and collective repayment histories. Once codified, that alternative data unlocked formal capital for over 112 savings groups, resulting in repayment rates between 85% and 95%.
“The problem was never their creditworthiness; the problem was that formal lenders simply lacked the eyes to see it,” Kaaya explained. “When you digitize their real community discipline and repayment history, the risk profile collapses, and you see bankable, high-performing enterprises.”
However, unlocking access to credit alone will not suffice in an era marked by accelerating climate volatility. The panel made a forceful case for “bundled” financial solutions—a unified, single-window product that packages concessionary working capital, digital climate advisory, and micro-insurance together by design.
Highlighting practical models already working at scale, Kaaya cited AI-driven, hyper-local weather forecasting deployed via SMS in Kenya through partnerships with TomorrowNow. Such tools provide smallholders with localized planting intelligence while arming lenders with predictive data to price weather risks accurately, effectively preventing climate-induced loan defaults before they happen.
“Climate-smart finance by design means a lender cannot continue to deliver credit in isolation while someone else handles insurance and another entity delivers advisory,” Kaaya maintained. “We do not need to invent new technologies from scratch. The innovations exist. We must bundle them together into single products and deliver them at scale to the populations that need them most.”
The strategic imperative of bundled support was echoed directly by young entrepreneurs on stage under the AGRA-led Youth Entrepreneurship for the Future of Food and Agriculture (YEFFA) program. Salma Salim Mtoi, an agripreneur from Tanzania, reminded the forum that capital without business capability is a wasted effort: “Finance alone is not enough. Without proper record-keeping systems and structured mentorship, capital merely leaks away. When finance is combined with enterprise training, that is when a venture becomes truly scalable.”
As delegates at AFSF 2026 prepare for the roll-out of the post-Malabo CAADP 2026–2035 Strategy and Action Plan, the Mastercard Foundation–AGRA blueprint sets a clear operational mandate: moving away from scattered pilot projects and establishing bundled, data-backed financial architecture that positions Africa’s youth not at the margins of social development, but at the direct center of commercial agri-food investments.