Pascal Murasira

Thank you, Abu Dhabi 🇦🇪 🙏🏾

I’ll share the key learnings from this week in my next newsletter: linkedin.com/newsletters/le…

Peter, u actually have a very serious economic insight here.

KGL’s conference economy creates a massive concentration of “meals”, information, institutions and people that can be valuable to someone trying to navigate a difficult job market.

The opportunity isn’t in “getting free meals”; it’s in recognizing and making legitimate use of the infrastructure that already exists around you.

Seen it in the conference i attended at KCC last month. Folks come from all over the world seeking opportunity in Kigali. Yet for some locals, these things bifite abo byagenewe. Which is of course ttl nonsense

Traveling to the UAE tonight 🇦🇪. If you're in Abu Dhabi or Dubai and interested in investing in Africa, let's chat.

Drinks on me 🥂

Muturangire ibiciro 😅 - @CityofKigali

Picking up Ms. Murasira from her first official kids’ mayoral duties at City Hall 🇳🇱

very proud dad moment, but also a little, oh boy… how many classes is she going to miss with all this kinderburgemesteer stuff?

next challenge is to find a balance between these leadership lessons and the school ones

#parenthood 🤦🏾‍♂️

Yesterday I joined One Acre Fund’s 20th anniversary celebration in The Hague 🇳🇱.

From a few dozen farm families in East Africa in 2006 to 5.9 million farming households across 10 countries in 2025, founder Andrew Youn took us through two decades of building with smallholders: a story of resilience, scaling, and many lessons learned along the way.

Another story that stayed with me was Diane’s: a Rwandan farmer and one of One Acre Fund's 2.3 million customers in the country.

In a documentary presented by Belinda Bwiza (CEO of One Acre Fund Rwanda), Diane spoke about what access to inputs, knowledge, and financing meant for her farm.
Without getting into the numbers, her point was that, with the right support, on terms farmers can actually understand and use, a season can produce much more compared to traditional top-down extension services, while keeping farmers firmly in charge of their own operations, as any other entrepreneur would.

That is what the delivery model One Acre Fund has championed all these years is built around: accountability to the customer, and the customer being a farmer.

The question for the rest of us is: how do we design solutions farmers value enough to invest in, and business models that can last because of that value, not just because of grants?

Happy 20th anniversary, One Acre Fund. Here’s to the next 20.

Is this the future of how governments should serve citizens in the age of AI? america.gov

Looking forward to joining today’s Grand Finals of the Food Systems Innovation Challenge at Wageningen University as a member of the jury!

The Challenge brings together university students from around the world to develop solutions to real-world food challenges.

Curious to see what they’ve come up with?

📅 29 September 2026
📍 Omnia, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
🔗 wur.eu/fsichallenge26

On a personal note, one lesson I’m taking home after a week in New York 🇺🇸 is that confidence and humility don't have to be opposites

Ambition is everywhere in Manhattan and this city has some kind of energy that pushes you to think a little bigger.

In many parts of the world, we’re taught to stay humble and wait our turn to speak.

people here aren’t afraid to dream big, introduce themselves, ask for a meeting, or share what they’re working on.

Maybe we could all use a small dose of the empire state of mind 😅

My thoughts from New York:

Think about this. In 2025, 2.1 billion people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity, 527 million more than in 2015, when the world committed to ending hunger by 2030.

Overall, with four years left until 2030, only 15% of the SDG targets with sufficient trend data are on track. Another 21% show moderate progress, while nearly half are advancing only marginally or not at all. 15% have slipped below their 2015 baseline.

What now?

We can spend our precious time assigning blame for this slow progress.
Or we can ask a more useful question:

What do we need to do differently in the next four years to accelerate progress on the ground?

That question is at the heart of my latest letter.

In it, i argue that one part of the answer deserves more attention: the people who bring different institutions, interests, and ideas together and keep things moving when no single organization can solve the problem alone.

I share one example from the African Food Fellowship (one of many) of how an apparently ordinary person can help create the collaboration needed to shift a system.

I would love to hear what you are seeing in your own ecosystem.

What is working that we should be learning from?

linkedin.com/pulse/letter-f…

Dangote might be one of the best things that ever happened to the Nigeria brand 🇳🇬

From Berlin (06/26) to New York (09/26), it’s a pleasure to link up again with my brother, Dr. Kingsley Uzoma in Manhattan (Senior Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria on Agribusiness and Productivity Enhancement).

Next time we meet in Abuja (Aso Rock Villa) - for the African Food Fellowship in Africa’s largest economy.

#GoNija

Guess who 😅

Arrived in America 🛬🇺🇸

Going to America 🛫 🇺🇸

Today I woke up to LinkedIn telling me I have crossed 70,000 followers on the platform.

What interests me isn't the metric, but what happened beneath the number.

Years of sharing ideas and learning in public, meeting new people, and connecting people who needed to find each other, making mistakes, learning from them, and trying again and again.

And eventually, a network started to compound.

I think this matters especially for those of us working to improve things in Africa.

There is a temptation, especially early in your career, to wait.

Wait until you have the right title.
Wait until you have more experience.
Wait until you are invited into the right room.
Wait until your work is polished enough to be seen.

I don’t think we can afford to wait.

For example, some of the most important people in Africa’s food systems work in places and roles that rarely get the visibility they deserve: on farms, inside businesses, in government, in learning institutions, in communities, and in civil society.

Your work deserves to be seen while you are still doing it, and you're the best person to tell that story.

Share what you are learning.

Tell people what problem you are trying to solve.

Celebrate someone else’s work.

Connect two people who should know each other.

Ask the question.

Open the conversation.

Keep showing up.

You may be surprised by what compounds.

LinkedIn has been so good to me. I hope to replicate the same here on X, posting a mix of serious stuff and some personal quirks.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately.

Picture an African market at dawn: maize, cassava, tomatoes, cooking oil. Someone selling. Someone buying.

We tend to focus a lot on the person selling.

How productive is the farm?
What are the yields?
What inputs are needed?
How do we get more food into the market?

All of that matters.

But what changes when we start with the person buying food and work backward through the system?

Who is buying this food?
What can they afford?
Where do they buy it?
What happens when food prices rise?
What food do they switch to?
What non-food items do they stop buying?

and,

What happens when food prices decrease?
Where do they spend their surplus income?
And what does that tell us about everything upstream?

This question matters because the picture is more complicated than “farmers produce, consumers buy.”

In African cities, food can take up 40–60% of household spending.
In several Eastern and Southern African countries, roughly half of rural farm households buy more staple food than they sell.

Many farming families are therefore both producers and customers.

I was born into a farming household and grew up around smallholder farmers and their grassroots organizations. So this is not just a statistic I have come across in a report. I have seen this reality up close: farming families producing food, while also having to buy food to feed their own families.

It makes me wonder whether we sometimes miss something important when we look at food systems mainly through the lens of production.

So what happens if we trace the system backward from that food buyer?

We might see opportunities that are harder to see from a production-first lens.

Different business models.

More efficient processing.

New distribution and infrastructure.

Better ways of financing small businesses along the chain.

Policy interventions that improve affordability, not just production.

And perhaps different places for capital to enter the food system.

This is not an argument for moving away from farmers. Quite the opposite.

It is an argument for looking at the whole system from another starting point.

Because if we understand who is paying, what they need, and how they make choices, we may understand the market upstream differently too.

There is also a leadership question here.

Food prices, climate, demographics, farming, and finance are not separate conversations. They are one system.

Do we have enough people who can connect those dots, and turn that understanding into things that actually get done?

I am in New York this week for Climate Week and the UN meetings, having conversations with funders and partners about these questions.

I am particularly interested in how we can better understand how Africa eats and what that understanding might unlock for the people producing, moving, financing, and selling its food.

Curious to hear how others see it.

Earlier, I wrote that Africa’s agri-food market is heading toward a trillion dollars while aid is shrinking.

This raises an important question: how do we make food systems transformation last beyond a typical project's lifespan?

Part of the answer is ensuring transformation doesn't depend solely on externally funded projects. It also needs to create value for the market players who have a reason to keep showing up.

At the recent Africa Food Festival in Kigali, @Onomo_Kigali did exactly that.

On short notice, they backed the Culinary Village, ran a booth throughout the Festival, and sponsored the opening and closing refreshments.

For ONOMO, this was about more than logo visibility. It put the hotel at the center of a growing agri-food ecosystem and in front of thousands of people who book hotels, host dinners, organize meetings, and bring events to Kigali.

The Festival ended. But the relationship doesn’t have to.

We are already discussing more ways to keep the hotel engaged in the broader food systems transformation conversation.

And that is the sustainability test I keep coming back to:

Does the private sector find the collaboration valuable enough to keep participating, not because a donor paid for it, but because it makes business sense?

Projects have end dates. Businesses repeat what creates value.

Grateful to the @OnomoHotels team for showing what this can look like.

Next week I’m in New York for Climate Week and the United Nations General Assembly.

A thought I’m carrying into those conversations:

Africa’s food and agribusiness market is racing toward $1 trillion by 2030.
At the same moment, official development assistance is under pressure and just posted its largest annual drop on record (-23.1% in 2025).

These two facts are usually told as opposites. I see them as linked.

Donor funding, at its best, is a catalyst: it opens pathways, de-risks early work, and buys time for people and institutions to organize.
Markets (farmers, firms, finance, infra, consumers) are where food systems actually have to live for the long run.

What often goes missing is the connective tissue between those worlds: local leaders who can translate a time-bound project into ongoing practice, relationships, and decisions once the grant cycle ends.

That is the space the African Food Fellowship will focus on in our next phase of growth (2027-2035): connected African food-systems leaders already in ministries, banks, companies, civil society, learning institutions, and farmers' organizations who keep useful work moving regardless of funding cycles.

If you will be in New York next week and work across food systems, development finance, investment, or African leadership, I’d like to meet.

Coffee, a corridor, or 15 minutes wherever you are Midtown/east side Manhattan.

DM me or email me. I’ll make space.

#ClimateWeekNYC #UNGA #AfricanFoodSystems #FoodSystems #Leadership

Sworn in this afternoon.

Very proud parents 🇳🇱👧🏽🇷🇼