The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development highlights the key role agrifood systems play in tackling global challenges like malnutrition, poverty, loss of  biodiversity and ecosystems services and climate change.
A wide range of stakeholders support food systems transformation, but their many independent initiatives lack a common framing of the complex interactions, interdependencies and trade-offs intrinsic to food systems, often resulting in policy incoherence and poorly integrated interventions.

In developing countries, and particularly in Africa, agrifood systems actors struggle to access the finance and investment needed to accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The inability of financial institutions and private investors to assess profitable opportunities within agribusiness markets is just one of the barriers that hinder investment.

Against this background, FAO launched the AGRINVEST global initiative, which aims to attract private investments aligned with the SDGs into agri-food systems, by leveraging public funds. This initiative intends to contribute to national development strategies, and to the upcoming Food Systems Summit to be convened by the United Nations Secretary General in 2021. AGRINVEST’s overarching goal is to help stakeholders better understand and manage the complex choices that affect the sustainability of agrifood systems and to accelerate progress toward the SDGs.

Under AGRINVEST, FAO, in partnership with the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM), is implementing the project “AGRINVEST - Enabling inclusive and efficient private sector investment in agrifood systems” to foster SDG-aligned investments in agrifood systems in Africa that contribute to sustainable economic growth and generate rural employment, particularly for women and the youth.  Benefitting from the financial support of the Government of Italy, the project is being implemented in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya and Niger.

• To reduce food insecurity and to foster employment and income generation.

The project aims to develop an approach for attracting SDG-aligned investments into agrifood systems, that could be replicated with similar impacts in other developing countries and regions.

• More inclusive, efficient and sustainable agrifood systems.

This outcome will be achieved by creating frameworks for coordinated action by different food systems stakeholders to transform agrifood systems into viable mechanisms for sustainable development, including through partnerships, policy dialogue and SDG-aligned investments.