The African Green Revolution Forum is by far no the world’s premier forum for African agriculture which aims at getting together stakeholders in the agricultural landscape under a single to discuss and commit to programs, investments, and policies to achieve an inclusive and sustainable agricultural transformation across the continent.
The African Green Revolution Forum started off as an annual “African Green Revolution Conference” by Yara International ASA in Norway in 2006, but the conference moved to the African continent in 2010 with the championing of the late Kofi Annan to take an African identity as the African Green Revolution Forum. This was to ensure leaders and stakeholders on the African continent can get involved greatly in the agricultural transformation agenda.
The African Green Revolution through these years has cultivated an unsurpassed power to assemble top leaders, implementers, thinkers, and investors in African agriculture across private, public, development and non-profit partners, and academic and research sectors. These assemblies were not for the fun of it but have yielded greats results and impacts, and this year’s forum shows a lot has been achieved and the continent is speeding up in the right direction.
This year’s forum was attended by man highly profiled persons across the Globe. Thus presidents, ex-presidents, head of states, ministers and other honorable members of states around the world. The president of the Republic of Ghana the host country was present and was involved in the session tagged as Heads of State & Government and High-Level Panel discussion. Youth organizations such as Youthlead members in Ghana who happens to be members of Youthmappers were also presentat the forum.
Mrs. Nane Annan of the Kofi Annan foundation who is the wife of the late Kofi Annan was also present at the forum. She elaborated in her special remarks on why Ghana gets to enjoy the honor of being the very first country to host the forum for the second time after the first in 2010. Firstly, she mentions the fact that organizers of the forum settled on hosting the forum in Ghana with the aim of honoring the late Kofi Annan for his immense contribution to the African continent and to the African Green Revolution Forum.
This year’s forum had the theme Grow Digital: Leveraging Digital Transformation to Drive Sustainable Food Systems in Africa. It is evident that every country in the world has gone through an agricultural revolution on the path to its wider economic transformation, including in Europe during the 18th century, the US in the 19th century, and much of Asia and Latin America from as recent as the 1950s. Therefore it is just right Africans take advantage of the current emerging technologies and transforms the state of agriculture hence this years theme.