AgriConnect

AgriConnect is sponsored by World Bank Group. AgriConnect is a World Bank Group initiative aimed at transforming smallholder farming, creating jobs, and strengthening global food security.

Event | AgriConnect—Farms, Firms, and Finance for Jobs | World Bank Live AgriConnect—Farms, Firms, and Finance for Jobs 📖 Read Remarks by Ajay Banga GO TO SPEAKERS | ONLINE Q&A | POLL RESULTS The World Bank Group’s Annual Meetings flagship event launched AgriConnect, a new initiative to transform small-scale farming into an engine of sustainable growth, jobs, and food security.

President Ajay Banga announced plans to double agribusiness commitments to $9 billion/year by 2030 and mobilize another $5 billion from partners. AgriConnect aims to scale what works: building infrastructure and skills, improving rules and land systems, de-risking private capital, and helping smallholders boost productivity, access markets, and build resilience via insurance and climate-smart tech.

Partners echoed the push—AfDB, IDB, and IFAD pledged to expand farmer reach and financing. The private sector stepped up (Bayer–WBG MoU to waive IP rights for nitrogen-fixing wheat trials in Africa), and digital solutions advanced (WBG–Google collaboration deploying AI tools for farmers). Across farmers, policymakers, and investors, one message stood out: partnerships unlock agriculture’s potential.

Tune in to the online conversation #WBGMeetings “Farmers are such an important part of the global economy, the opportunities are there, and it's nothing short of irresponsible for not providing the support to enable all of us to unlock what that upside is. ” —Ruth Porat, President & CIO, Alphabet & Google “So, we hope that agriculture is the net climate solution, and we do this by using renewable energy.

” —Nidhi Pant, Cofounder, S4S Technologies “We have to partner with governments to reach scale in agriculture. ” —Rose Goslinga, President & Co-founder, Pula “Her eyes lit up. She had a big smile, and she said cash!

[...] We never had cash. Now, we have cash.

[...] I buy more seeds. I buy trees.

We've expanded our farm. ” —Bill Anderson, CEO, Bayer AG “The issue is about scaling it up. That’s where the government has come in—ensuring the banking sector steps up.

We’ve given first loss guarantees and want to provide subsidized financing. For small famers, who are not land owners most of the time, we have also put out schemes so that we can have uncollateralized debt financing for them.

” —Muhammad Aurangzeb, Minister of Finance, Pakistan 10:00 AM | Scene setting - Performance by Mufasa the poet, Artist, Kenya 10:05 AM | Opening Remarks - Ajay Banga, President, World Bank Group 10:10 AM | View from the field - Nidhi Pant, a tech innovator from India, and Ricardo Parra, a farmer from Argentina, will share their achievements and challenges.

10:18 AM | Ministerial Panel - Government ministers talk about how their countries are harnessing agribusiness to create jobs.

Speakers: Muhammad Aurangzeb, Minister of Finance of Pakistan Mariama Cire Sylla, Minister of Agriculture of Guinea Yegor Perelygin, Deputy Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, Ukraine 10:40 AM | Partners commit to supporting AgriConnect - Speakers include Alvaro Lario, President of IFAD; Sidi Ould Tah, President of AfDB; Ilan Goldfajn, President of IDB.

10:45 AM | Private Sector Panel - Representatives from private companies discuss the role of private capital and companies in supporting smallholder farmers. Speakers: Chege Kirundi, Chairman of Kenya Tea Development Agency Rose Goslinga, President of Pula 11:15 AM | Ruth Porat, President and Chief Investment Officer of Alphabet and Google, speaks to Ajay Banga about how technology can support small farmers around the world.

My grandmother was no magician, but I’ve been told it was miraculous how she schooled and fed her children with no job. She did not pull a rabbit out of her hat. She was known to pull strings for her children.

To my grandmother, anyone old enough to say, “I’m hungry,” was old enough to go to the farm. And I remember, we planted maize, veggies, beans, potatoes, even mangoes, avocados. You could have called them the fruits of our work.

Farming was a passion rooted in our existence. Our house structure did not say high standard of living, but I’ll tell you right now, for fun, we climbed tall fruit trees and it was our standard of living. I watched a three-acre farm raise a banker, a pharmacist, an entrepreneur.

And I’m not saying farming always bought enough. I’m saying it was pivotal when everything was tough. I learned people need people, and farms do not just feed people.

They nourish communities, they feed dreams, they plant realities. I say agriculture, and it’s easy to think of food on the table. But when I table our needs, you will see agriculture has done way more for the people, held families more than hands, handed a future today, even to people who know nothing about plants, but some are paid for their plants.

I’m talking drivers, engineers, policymakers, marketers, a chain of jobs, and you are free to think. Where I come from, and I want to say Kenya, but I can also say Africa, and still mean to say agriculture, is the backbone of our economy, the spine to food security. I want to say it has upheld us, but I can also say it has held us down, a crown on the heads of farmers who cannot be seen in a concrete city.

But don’t we feel it when the prices are too high, when farmers are going through it? Isn’t it a survival all through it? Ain’t we affected by factors that affect a farmer?

And yet it’s like we’re left farming in the hands of a past getting older and older. But age is not what you lose when you let agriculture be an aging sector, when the world is peeling and when it takes extra skin to take care of your kin. The hunger of those who lack something to eat will not let us sleep in peace.

And it’s not just mothers. Everyone pays when the youth cannot find a job that pays. Tomorrow is a dream.

And agriculture can close the distance between today and a vision. But if only we do something about a sector that has been deemed less appealing to deal in, if only we induce young minds to come into a venture that needs the adventure of innovation, creativity, high energy. I close my eyes.

And for millions of young people at the end of a corner, I see agriculture as a way, a chance, a shot to make it, to make it out, to make something of themselves, to lead self, to lead for all our sake. So, what are we waiting for? Indeed.

What are we waiting for? Yes. That was quite something.

Thank you, Mufasa. Thank you so very much for giving us a glimpse into the lives of farmers in Africa. Firstly, I must say it’s so good, it’s so lovely to see a packed house for the flagship event, AgriConnect initiative right here at the Annual Meetings.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the 2025 Annual Meetings of the World Bank Group and the IMF. I’m Tanvir Gill from the World Bank Group, and I will be your host and moderator for this session. Welcome also to AgriConnect, the flagship event this season to discuss farms, firms, and the finance of jobs in the agricultural sector.

We want this to be an inclusive event. So, all of you to my right, all of you to my left, all of you in this room, and all of you watching across the world, we want you to share your thoughts on this topic anytime using the hashtag #WBGMeetings. We have experts in multiple languages standing by to answer your questions online at live.

worldbank. org. Submit your questions in the live chat or using the QR code displayed in front of you.

Okay, let’s start the show. Let’s start the show. Let’s start it by inviting on stage.

Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for the President of the World Bank Group, Mr. Ajay Banga, who will lay out his vision for the Banks’ AgriConnect initiative. Mr. Banga. Nice to see you.

Good morning, everybody. And Tanvir, thank you for that introduction, and for that poem that we just saw being enacted. Look, agriculture has always been central to development.

But today, the real issue is, the challenge is, how do you make it a driver of jobs? How do you make it a driver of income? How do you get to food security at scale?

How to grow more food, but then turn that growth into a business that produces higher incomes for smallholder farmers and more opportunity across entire economies? Let me start with the why. Over the next 10 to 15 years, about 1.

2 billion young people in developing countries will come of age. But current trends suggest that only 400 million jobs will be created. That delta, this is hundreds of millions, will either power the global economy or they will spill over into unrest and migration.

That’s why we think that the World Bank Group has to make job creation our central mission. Most jobs ultimately come from the private sector, but they don’t all start there. Countries move along a continuum early on.

The public sector tends to drive job creation. Over time, the private capital and entrepreneurship there in that country and from overseas tend to take the lead. Our three-pillar strategy on jobs reflects that arc.

Build infrastructure and skills, create predictable regulations and governance in a business-friendly environment with the right guide rails, and back investors with risk tools that crowd in capital. So where do these jobs come from? We see potential in five sectors: infrastructure, agribusiness, healthcare, tourism, and value-added manufacturing.

When I say infrastructure, I mean both physical and human infrastructure. Bridges, roads, airports, education, healthcare, skilling. Today, we focus on agribusiness, central both to jobs and to meeting global food demand that has projected a rise more than 50% in the coming decades.

Emerging markets are at the center of both of those. The developing world has the ingredients. It has land, it has sun, it has water, it has people.

Africa has 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land and can boost heels on land that is already farmed. Latin America already produces enough food for well over a billion people but infrastructure there is a challenge. And across Asia, smallholder farmers manage most farmland, an enormous base that we can help to lift with better technology, better finance, and better access to markets.

Here’s the issue. Globally, 500 million smallholder farmers produce 80% of the world’s food. Yet most of them remain stuck in subsistence farming.

They lack electricity, storage, leverage, training, market access. Fewer than one in 10 have access to commercial finance, let alone crop insurance. This opportunity has been there for decades.

What’s changing now is our ability to organize at scale to shape the future of food security, nutrition, growth, and employment. Last year, the World Bank Group began executing a strategy that recognized that reality. What we have set out to do is first, help smallholders raise productivity and scale.

Second, connect them to structured value chains that lift incomes. And third, guard against exploitation so farmers aren’t forced to sell land for lack of credit, for lack of insurance, or lack of market access. At the same time, we’ve set a target to double our agribusiness commitments to 9 billion dollars a year by 2030, aiming to also mobilize an additional $5 billion from other sources in the private sector.

Now, this is what is grounded based on what we have tested in the field and in lessons we are borrowing from others. Remember, stealing shamelessly and sharing seamlessly, that is how we will succeed together. You will hear me talk about stealing shamelessly all the time.

It’s not a word bankers use, but it explains exactly what we need to do. Don’t reinvent the wheel at each location. Feel free to copy and steal shamelessly.

Today, we are looking to push this effort closer to scaled execution. The foundation that needs to exist is clear. Policy and infrastructure fixes where they matter.

Clarity on land tenure, seed and sanitary standards, basics like irrigation, rural roads, storage and power for the coal chain. Focus on the small farmer who lacks inputs, lacks credit, lacks advice, lacks a dependable buyer. Producer organizations often built by governments, entrepreneurs, or private sector players, they can connect them to suppliers, to insurers, to buyers, and lenders.

That gets advice, fertilizer, and working capital to the field, and it creates predictable routes to market. Once predictivity and scale improve, cooperatives sell into structured offtake with SMEs or larger firms. Farmers capture more value, lenders see predictable cash flows, and incomes rise.

I have seen this personally in my first job when I was a young management trainee in India working with Nestlé. I saw this work with dairy farmers in the Punjab. I’ve seen it with the Amul Cooperative in India, which transformed India from being one of the world’s most milk-short countries to the number one producer of milk in the world.

This works with small farmers, but we have to make it put together. Resilience is embedded at the beginning. It is not added later.

Heat tolerance seeds, soil-matched fertilizers, rejuvenation techniques, efficient irrigation, and strong insurance and financing underpin so that a season doesn’t become a bad year, doesn’t become a bad life. Digital is the glue that holds the system together.

Small AI tools and basic phones that can diagnose crop disease from a photograph, that can inform fertilizer choices, it can prompt action well ahead of a weather event and move payments securely. That data trail then becomes a credit history. Better underwriting lowers the cost of capital, lower costs, draw in more lenders.

That’s the virtuous loop that we want to build. This is not theory. A couple of months ago, I was in India and Uttar Pradesh.

I saw all this come together. The foundation, the cooperatives, the resilience, and most importantly, the glue that held it together, the digital system, and it delivered. Proof of concept is it works, and now we need to scale it, and it is scalable.

That’s the ecosystem we want to replicate wherever possible. That’s the ecosystem we want to steal shamelessly. But it only succeeds if government, business, and development partners row in the same direction.

That is what is on display the rest of this morning. I thank you very much for listening to me. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you very much, President Banga, for your opening remarks and very inspiring indeed. Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you a bit about myself.

Before joining the World Bank in my previous life, I covered global business and financial news for over two decades. And there was one number that stood out for me, a number that I was pretty much obsessed with as a business journalist on a weekly, monthly basis, and that was the food inflation number. Why?

Because food inflation has been the key reason for the rising inflation trend all over the world for the last few years. Food and vegetable prices hit their highest level in 2021. Highest since 2005, and have stayed elevated due to supply-side disruptions, dominating dinner table conversations across the world, which makes this topic deeply, deeply personal because it’s also linked to the cost-of-living crisis that we are facing.

Global food production needs to increase. It needs to increase by 30% by 2050 to feed nearly 10 billion people by then. It’s a big target, but it must be achieved.

Hence, the agribusiness, growing food, growing jobs, is such a core part of the World Bank’s developmental goals. It’s such a high priority for us. Agriculture accounts for roughly 40% of jobs in developing countries.

We cannot hope to eliminate poverty, as President Banga highlighted, without supporting our farmers. And that brings me to you, all of you watching. We want to hear what you think about which area of farming and agribusiness has the most potential to grow the economy and create jobs in emerging markets.

Your options are on the screen. It should be, one, modernize small farmer techniques to boost productivity. Two, expand access to local and export markets.

Three, advance digital tools and AI in rural areas. Four, improve access to financing for small farmers, which, by the way, is a big problem. Let us know your thoughts online at live.

worldbank. org or using the QR codes in the room. Okay, moving on.

Now, let me invite on stage a farmer and a tech innovator who will share with us their stories on how they are boosting production, driving business, and creating jobs. Please, join me in welcoming on stage Mr. Ricardo Parra, who is the CEO of Las Quinas in Argentina. Ricardo works directly with small producers and women’s cooperatives promoting innovation in value-added food processing.

He’s joined by Ms. Nidhi Pant, who is the co-founder of S4S Technologies, Science for Society. Nidhi trains smallholder women farmers to be entrepreneurs by providing them technology, finance, and market access. Could we have a loud round of applause for both of them?

They’re both doing some ground-breaking work and really making the change that can take this sector forward in many ways. Ricardo, let me start off by asking you, tell us your story, because Argentina is the third largest food exporter in the world. And so, cooperatives like you, how can you galvanize more support to help protect the interest of the smallholder farmers and the farming family community?

Thank you. I’m honored and I’m also grateful to be here today. I’m a beekeeper.

I’m from a... You are a beekeeper, yes. Yes.

I’m from a very small town in a rural area called General Las Heras, in Buenos Aires province, Argentina, where farming is not just a job, it’s a way of life. At Las Quinas, we work hand in hand with cooperatives of women and small producers. Some are beekeepers, some others gather fruits, special fruits, like the prickly pear from Santiago del Estero, a province at the north of Argentina.

We also provide training to help them to learn new skills. We guide them in formalizing their shops, their business. And also, we work together creating value-added products like jams or bottled honey.

They have the chance not to sell only raw honey or raw fruits. We do all this with solar panels, zero waste. This work and the education that comes with it, it’s helping hundreds of families to break free from poverty.

What’s your vision for your business, Ricardo? In the future, I have a dream. I wish that these cooperatives, these little farmers in Argentina, have Internet access to use the tech tools that are available.

Also, I hope they have access to credit in order to expand their jobs, their projects. Also, it’s another dream that they have the chance to sell their productions through for trade. And you know why?

Because for me, these cooperatives, these farmers, these small producers are the invisible heroes, the heart of our food system. Yeah, and what do you hope the government would do to help you even more, and also the private sector, because like you said, formal credit is a problem? Yes, we need to work together.

The funds are exceptionally... We want the funds, but what we need is education. We need to work together in the field.

It’s very close. Right. I want to move to Nidhi now and get your story as well for our audience here, Nidhi, because it’s very inspiring.

You work with women entrepreneurs in India, women smallholder farmers. Before we talk a little bit about your business, I want to understand, broadly speaking, how’s the face of agriculture changing in India, which agriculture employs 50% of its labor force? Agriculture, of course, employs 50% of India’s labor force and contributes 18% to 20% to India’s GDP.

Where does the story go from there? Thank you for that question. At S4S, we help smallholder women farmers to become processors.

We help them get more value for their produce. We provide them with renewable energy-powered equipment, which are solar or biomass-based dehydrators, grain millers, or milk evaporators. So, women who were only selling tomatoes can today sell ketchup.

So, we helped them move up the value chain. So first, by providing them with technology. Second, by providing them with access to finance.

If you take the story of a smallholder woman farmer who does not have any collateral because of patriarchy, the landholding is with the brother or the husband, so they don’t even have access to a bank account or have access to formal credit. These women farmers are not able to invest today on the infrastructure.

So, what we do is that we partner with the State Bank of India, where we help them— Which is India’s largest public sector lender, yes. Yes. And we help them get access to loans for them as affordable as 6%.

We started with 31% with non-banking financial institutions. This could only be possible when we bought the markets closer to them. We first had to show the banks that there was a cash flow coming in.

When these women farmers started making these food ingredients that go in your ketchup or in your ready-to-eat products, we partnered with large food FMCG companies, secured the market for these women farmers that today they can sell their produce directly to these large corporates that are very stringent with quality. They can match to their standards. Once that market was secured, the banks also came in.

It was a systemic approach where different stakeholders were coming together. We brought down the access to credit from 31% to 6%. What it does is that today a smallholder farmer in India who was earlier a daily wage worker or a part who was working on her farm and had to travel out of her village from 5:00 AM to 6:00 PM, had caregiving responsibilities, was not having any opportunity to have any manufacturing set up.

Today at her farm, at her village, has more control over her time and is able to set up this business. I think that is what India is doing, is going more up the value chain, helping farmers, not only think as farmers, but also as entrepreneurs. And becoming more inclusive, right?

With more women joining the workforce and contributing to the agricultural sector. What’s your dream? Because that’s the question that I asked Ricardo as well.

What’s your dream with your business? Our dream is that today you find that these ingredients are produced by the farmers, but we believe that these ingredients would also be processed by the farmers. We want them to make more value-added products in a more equitable and sustainable manner.

We hope that agriculture is a net climate solution, and we do this by making renewable energy-powered solutions. I have to go, but what are you expecting from the government? We expect that the government has created infrastructure support so that we can also access higher-valued markets like exports.

The roads are good where we are going to these villages. There’s also reliable electricity so that these women, once they also process these ingredients, also have access to a better living, better lives, and they don’t eat last. Yes.

When we talk about financial freedom for women and independence, that’s a story that is a live example of how things are changing on the ground. Thank you so very much for your inspiring stories. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for Nidhi and Ricardo.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much, sir, for joining us. Okay.

At the World Bank Group, we are focused on connecting the dots between, one, investing in foundational infrastructure, something that President Banga spoke about, which is critical to job creation, and both physical and human capital. Two, supporting policy and regulatory reforms that establish a business-friendly environment. And three, mobilizing private investment at scale.

At scale being the operative term. With AgriConnect, we are aiming to bring this approach to life across the food chain. However, time is of the essence, and the data suggests things are not looking good.

We’ll bring up some numbers for you on the screen. Now, you can look at these numbers as glass half full or glass half empty. We, at the World Bank, are more solution-oriented, and we are trying to move the needle in actually making changes on the ground that can help with achieving some of the big targets that have been laid out.

As of now, less than 25% of all cropland is irrigated, which means it’s a tremendous scope for getting more land under irrigation. One third, 33% of all food produced globally is lost or wasted. Here’s the really big one.

This is the big number coming your way. Five trillion dollars’ worth of infrastructure will be needed by 2040 to unlock global agriculture’s full potential. That’s more than the size of the Indian economy, or Japan, or Germany.

That’s basically a lot of money that we are talking about. Let’s start by understanding how the public sector can create a supporting policy and regulatory environment for investments. Please, join me in welcoming on stage Mr. Muhammad Aurangzeb, who’s the Minister of Finance from Pakistan, sir.

Mr. Yegor Perelygin, who is the Deputy Minister of Environment and Natural Resources from Ukraine, and Ms. Mariama Cire Sylla, the Minister of Agriculture from Guinea. Thank you so very much, your Excellencies, for joining us this morning. So glad that you could make the time to be here.

Since we have 20 minutes on this panel discussion and a lot to cover, we’ll hit the ground running. Our hearts go out, Mr. Aurangzeb, to the farmers in Pakistan who’ve been impacted by the flood. I know that you’ve spoken about how relief measures have been put in place.

But what work is being done to insulate farmers from climate shocks in the future? Yeah. I think just the fact-base, about 24% of our country’s GDP is associated with agriculture.

And about 95% of the farmers are subsistence-level farmers because they own less than five hectares. The issue has been all the what and the why have been very clearly laid out by President Banga, so I’m not going to get into that. But the issues are really related to access to finance, also the storage, and the entire value chain discussion as well.

But from the government’s perspective, first of all, I think we need to get the heck out of everything. Those crops which are doing well, including the export potential, which is rice, maize, they’re doing extremely well in the private sector. We eat sugar.

We have big problems. So, we have to just continue with the deregulation that is happening at this point in time. That’s one.

Secondly, with respect to access to finance, we have done pilots in Pakistan, where for small farmers, seed and the in-kind products, the pesticides have been given to them. Agronomy services have been provided. Also, with respect to satellite imagery and what type of crop cycle they do, mechanized farming, but for that you need contiguous farms, and then their offtake being taken by the corporates.

So, if you think about this closed loop, those interventions, the proof of concept is there with respect to the yields going up, but also the real money into the small farmer’s pocket has gone up when you bring in formalized credit into the picture and you take the middleman out of the picture. The issue is really about scaling it up. And that’s where the government has also come in in terms of ensuring that the banking sector steps up.

So, we have given first loss guarantees, and we want to also provide subsidized financing. And the third thing is, especially for the small farmers, just think about it, they are not actually land owners most of the time. So, we have also put out schemes so that we can have uncollateralized debt financing for these small farmers.

So, these are the interventions which are taking place, and I fully agree with President Banga, that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. And he used the word stealing without any fear. Yeah, cut, copy, paste.

But really, success transfer from all the countries from where we can learn, where they’ve been able to scale it up.

I think we do have a menu on which the government can help with the ecosystem while staying out of it, the storage, the warehouses, so that we can move towards electronic warehouse, receipt financing, because for the small farmers, another big issue is that they are selling, they are forced to sell at a price and at times when they don’t need to.

So having that entire storage capacity and warehouse capacity, these are all areas which the government is working on at this point in time, but we do have a long way to go. You do have a long way to go. And I’ll come back to you on that.

Minister from Ukraine, I do want to get your thoughts in as well. It’s been an extremely difficult time, needless to say, for the farmers in Ukraine, and it’s been devastating for them. But what is being done on the ground in terms of helping farmers?

Because I know that, from a resource allocation perspective, your hands are tied. And so how are you trying to do your best to help farmers in this situation? Thank you very much for that question.

It’s a pleasure to be here. And look, the situation, yes, it’s indeed difficult. You have to consider one very important strategic and core fact about the agricultural nature of our country, which