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To Wawira Njiru, maize is the style of dwelling.
“When I was a kid, my favorite food was ugali — still is,” she says. Ugali is the staple meals of Kenya, a thick polenta-like porridge created from floor cornmeal, and served with stewed beef and greens.
It’s fashionable by Eastern and Southern Africa, too. “I’ve traveled to a couple of countries, like Zambia recently, where they say, it’s not food without their version of ugali,” says Njiru.
Her love of meals impressed her to launch Food4Education in 2012. The Kenyan nonprofit started serving faculty meals to simply 25 kids, and has since scaled to dish up lunch for 600,000 children throughout Kenya.
It’s hardly shocking that maize, also referred to as corn, is the continent’s most generally grown crop, grown throughout round 40 million hectares on the continent.
But maize is in hassle.
Maize requires a lot of water to develop. Most of Africa’s 33 million smallholder farms are rain-fed, offering an unreliable and inconsistent quantity of water.
Climate change is making this worse: up to now decade, extreme droughts have devastated crops. Between 2020 and 2023, the Horn of Africa — which incorporates Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia — skilled six consecutive wet seasons with no rain, one of many longest and most extreme droughts on report according to the UN. Across East, Central and West Africa, an estimated 111 million folks face meals insecurity, primarily as a consequence of local weather change and conflicts, in line with the World Bank.
The average maize yield in Africa is simply 2.1 tons per hectare, in comparison with 5.9 globally and 11.1 within the US, the world’s largest maize producer.
To meet demand, Africa imports round $50 billion of food yearly, predominantly cereals. But world occasions, just like the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s assault on Ukraine have interrupted the availability chain, driving up prices.
“We had times where maize was twice as much, or three times as much, per bag,” says Njiru.
“We’ve seen a lot of volatility when it comes to price shocks caused by climate change, the lack of a structured market, and demand versus supply,” says Njiru. “In other parts of the world, shocks happen, but you don’t see as much adverse effects.”
With maize offering a good portion of the full calorie consumption for tens of millions of individuals on the continent, its volatility leaves Africa’s meals safety in query — but folks like Njiru are searching for options, to future-proof the continent’s meals system.
First domesticated in Mexico over 9,000 years in the past, maize was first delivered to Africa within the sixteenth century.
With increased yields, maize started to interchange indigenous crops — which was later bolstered by colonial insurance policies.
But whereas maize’s yields exceed indigenous crops underneath optimum circumstances, monocultural farming practices (the cultivation of a single crop) have degraded the soil, and local weather change — notably drought — is throwing its dominance into query.
Compared to maize, lots of Africa’s indigenous crops, like sorghum and teff, are extra resilient to local weather change, but have been uncared for by analysis and coverage, says Ismahane Elouafi, government managing director of CGIAR, previously the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.
“Most of those neglected species are much more nutritious than the ones we have right now,” says Elouafi.
But switching to indigenous grains isn’t an computerized win. Unlike many different nations in Africa, Ethiopia’s staple crop is teff; but its yield is low as a consequence of degraded soil and a lack of productive seed varieties, and the nation nonetheless faces extreme ranges of malnutrition and starvation.
That’s why the main focus is not simply on changing one monoculture with one other, but diversifying meals manufacturing in Africa — the place at the moment, maize, rice and wheat make up 60% of all of the energy consumed — to assist mitigate the affect of local weather change and supply dietary worth, says Elouafi.
Nutritional high quality is a key concern for Food4Education, says Njiru.
“We serve a fortified porridge: the base is maize, and then it’s fortified with sorghum and millet,” which provides extra fiber, says Njiru.
While the dietary composition is essential, one other facet is pricing: sustaining constant, low prices for the meals — which price round 30 cents every — is key, says Njiru.
But switching from maize to those indigenous grains requires higher availability and a sustainable provide chain. Sorghum is Africa’s second most grown cereal by quantity, but nearly all of this produce goes to beer production.
“If we try to buy sorghum at the scale that we’re at, we’d be competing with a beer company,” says Njiru. “The cost and availability is one of the challenges that we have to think about.”
To assist meet its rising calls for for produce — round 100 tons per day — Food4Education sources 80% of its components from cooperatives and smallholder farmers, which make up 70% of Africa’s food supply.
“When we think about school feeding, we see it as a full economy in itself,” says Njiru, including that one of many firm’s first suppliers used to ship batches of components on the again of a bike; now, it takes 65 vans. Food4Education’s mannequin and scale gives dependable demand for crops like sorghum and millet, which are typically much less fashionable for cooking as a consequence of their bitter flavors and notion that they are much less trendy than maize.
Bigger modifications are taking place, too. In May 2025, the Kenyan government introduced it might embody sorghum, millet, pigeon peas, and inexperienced grams (mung beans) within the National Grain Reserve. Previously dominated by maize and wheat, this transfer goals to enhance meals safety, promote climate-smart agriculture and diversify the nationwide meals system.
Despite being a non-native plant, maize is deeply embedded in lots of African culinary traditions and nationwide diets.
That’s why some are methods to optimize maize yields as a substitute.
Through the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico, CGIAR has been breeding stress-tolerant maize varieties particularly for the African marketplace for 15 years, concentrating on drought and disease-resistant qualities.
In 2016, it started distributing drought-tolerant maize (DTM) varieties, says Elouafi. So far, greater than 150 DTM varieties have been launched and commercialized by native seed corporations. In 2024, round 205,000 tons of licensed seed had been planted on 8.4 million hectares, benefiting round 60 million folks throughout 20 nations.
CGIAR estimates that on common, the DTM varieties produce an extra 500 kilograms (1,102 kilos) extra grain per hectare.
Other seed variants make the crops extra immune to illness and pests, like fall armyworm, whereas others increase vitamin, together with a selection that has increased ranges of vitamin A. Seed manufacturing has turn into a main enterprise on the continent. According to AGRA (previously referred to as the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa), in 2006, simply 20 non-public seed corporations produced round 2,000 metric tons of seeds; but funding, analysis and favorable coverage modifications meant that by 2023, licensed seed manufacturing by native startups hit 358,312 metric tons.
The Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) toolkit — developed by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture and African Development Bank (AfDB) in collaboration with CGIAR — launched in 2018.
The initiative works throughout a number of elements of agriculture, from farmer coaching and expertise demonstrations, to growing provide chain and regulatory frameworks, and throughout its first and second phases reached 25 million farmers and elevated crop yields by a mean of 69% (together with by 50% for maize), leading to 62 million metric tons of meals.
“It was an amazing outreach in terms of bringing technology to farmers and increasing productivity and wellbeing of farmers,” says Elouafi, including that CGIAR is exploring a third part of this system that may “go beyond that and accelerate adoption of technologies in Africa.”
Agroecology, also referred to as regenerative agriculture, is one other farming method which “mimics natural systems” and may help restore degraded lands, says Chris Macoloo, the regional director for East Africa at World Neighbors, a world NGO that gives coaching and academic packages to empower communities to sort out points like starvation and malnutrition.
“Industrial agriculture has resulted in disempowering people, the death of our soils, and made people indebted to other food systems in the West, instead of developing things from within,” says Macoloo. As a lot as 65% of Africa’s cultivated land is degraded, and the continent loses an estimated $4 billion value of soil vitamins annually.
By replicating processes from pure ecosystems, agroecology can increase productiveness whereas decreasing reliance on chemical fertilizers. For instance, planting peas, which are wealthy in nitrogen, with different crops, can naturally fertilize the soil; in Malawi, a undertaking that planted maize with legumes elevated yields by as much as 38%.
While Elouafi agrees that agroecology is “the best way forward,” she provides that it takes time to construct up microorganisms within the soil, so governments want to consider incentives for farmers. “They might produce less in the first three to four, maybe five years, so you need to pay the farmer for that delay of high productivity so that they continue those practices,” she provides.
Elouafi estimates that through applied sciences like TAAT, Africa “can increase its productivity by five to seven times,” but the “huge investment gap” creates a difficulty. While organizations like AfDB, the World Bank and AGRA have supplied billions in funding, collaboration with the non-public sector is important, she says: “Unless they are in, we cannot achieve zero poverty, or at least, reduce malnutrition.”
The Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) is doing simply that: the Austria-based nonprofit works with the non-public sector to design packages to increase solar-powered options, together with for agriculture.
One expertise that has turn into more and more fashionable is solar-powered irrigation methods, says Kumbirai Makanza, a senior specialist for renewable power finance at REEEP. Irrigation methods can present constant water, which is notably essential for crops like maize.
“It allows (farmers) to have security against climate change,” says Makanza. “We’ve also seen, it’s an opportunity to introduce a second crop, a rotational crop, instead of maybe only wait for the rainy season once in a year.”
Njiru is additionally seeing a change in the best way that farmers are approaching their crops, from crop rotation to extra funding in applied sciences like photo voltaic irrigation. Many of the cooperatives she works with supply advisory providers to assist farmers increase yield, or entry instruments and financing they should enhance their harvest.
Food4Education is planning to increase its farm-to-fork mannequin into extra nations within the coming years, together with Zambia and Ethiopia, the place it’ll have a possibility to experiment with totally different menus, and construct new agricultural networks that she hopes can present meals safety for college meals into the long run.
“When I think about food systems and food security, the word that comes to mind is resilience,” says Njiru. “When we talk about maize, when we talk about any other crop — what can provide people food consistently, and the nutrients that they need consistently?”