AFT Coordinator Jonas Chianu said the Fund provided grants that enabled SMEs to conduct project preparation studies to eliminate barriers to take-off, thereby developing a pipeline of bankable projects.

“It is $120 million in total. It’s in three ways of funding of $40 million each time. The current span of the project is between 2018 and 2021, so it’s about four years for the seed money for investment.

AfDB was planning to mobilise a total of $800 million for the project implementation across the three years of execution.

“We hope that this programme will contribute to reducing the food import bill to Africa of about $35 billion per year,” he added.

Adesina, however, said that the statistics, in reality, showed that the number of hungry people in the world had increased from 777 million in 2015 to 815 million in 2016.

The keynote speaker is the AfDB president, Dr. Akinvumi Adesina.

“This will help us achieve the vision of making agriculture a business, as enshrined in the Bank’s Feed Africa strategy.”

“With the rapid pace of growth of the use of drones, automated tractors, artificial intelligence, robotics and block chains, agriculture as we know it today will change.” - The President of the African Development Bank Group, Akinwumi Adesina.

''Nigeria and other African countries spend $35 billion yearly importing food.'' - The African Development Bank (AfDB) Group.

''Nigeria is currently producing 7 million tons of maize annually out of the 8 million tons the country requires'' - Director, Agriculture and Agro-industry; African Development Bank, Dr Martins Fregene.

”Technologies to achieve Africa’s green revolution exist, but are mostly just sitting on the shelves. The challenge is a lack of supportive policies to ensure that they are scaled up to reach millions of farmers,”

The African Development Bank (AfDB) today said it will invest $120 million in the next 2-3 years to boost the productivity and transform cassava and other eight other commodities on the continent.