Bridging Investment and Impact: AAI Brings the Adaptation Lens to AgriTech at RiseUp Summit

Imèn Meliane – Senior Advisor on Adaptation Finance, AAI

At the RiseUp Summit, one of the region’s leading entrepreneurship and innovation gatherings, a high-level panel convened to tackle a critical question for Africa’s future: how can agricultural innovation reconcile commercial viability with the realities of climate adaptation and food security?

The session, “Navigating the friction between commercial viability and sustainable development,” brought together investors, market actors, and adaptation practitioners to debate the trade-offs shaping modern AgriTech. Panelists included Malek Sultan, Co-Founder & Partner at DisruptTech Ventures; Sherief Kesseba, Managing Partner at the Climate Resilient Africa Fund; Imen Meliane, Senior Advisor at the Africa Adaptation Initiative; Mariam El Sharkawy, Head of AgriTech and E-Commerce at eAswaaq Misr; and Hana Abdulla, Programs Associate at RiseUp.

Reframing Scale Through the Lens of Adaptation

Speaking from an Africa-wide adaptation perspective, AAI emphasized that the debate between profitability and inclusion is a false binary. In Africa, smallholder farmers underpin food security, rural livelihoods, and social stability, making them central rather than peripheral to scalable innovation.

AAI highlighted that AgriTech solutions designed without accounting for climate risk, seasonal cashflow, and access to finance risk amplifying systemic vulnerabilities rather than reducing them. True scale, the panel heard, comes from designing technologies that respond to farmers’ lived realities and embedding them within broader systems of finance, risk-sharing, and markets.

From Information to Action: What Adaptation Really Requires

The discussion underscored that while digital tools (such as weather and advisory platforms) are essential, information alone does not save a harvest. Effective climate adaptation requires an integrated approach that combines decision intelligence with access to inputs, timely liquidity, risk-transfer mechanisms, and secure market access.

This systemic framing aligns closely with AAI’s long-standing position: climate adaptation in agriculture is not a standalone technological challenge, but a development and resilience challenge requiring coordinated action across public and private actors.

The Role of Public Finance in Unlocking Private Innovation

A key takeaway from the session was the catalytic role of public climate finance in enabling innovation at scale. Panelists discussed how blended finance, guarantees, and concessional capital can de-risk early-stage adaptation solutions, crowd in private investment, and ensure that resilience benefits reach farmers rather than remaining locked in pilot projects.

AAI stressed that adaptation delivers public goods: food security, avoided humanitarian costs, and economic stability and that public finance should be used strategically to unlock markets, not distort them.

AAI’s Forward Path: Aligning Investors and Adaptation Outcomes

The panel reinforced the relevance of AAI’s mandate to bridge policy, finance, and on-the-ground implementation. As Africa prepares for upcoming global climate milestones, including COP32, AAI continues to advocate for investment frameworks that align investor expectations with Africa’s adaptation priorities.

By bringing the adaptation lens into entrepreneurial and investment spaces such as RiseUp, AAI is helping shift the narrative from short-term returns toward long-term resilience, and from isolated tech solutions toward systems that work for farmers, markets, and climate-vulnerable communities alike.

What’s Next for AAI: Turning African-Led Innovation into Scalable Food Security Solutions

As climate risks intensify and food systems come under growing pressure, AAI is moving decisively from dialogue to delivery. The insights from the RiseUp panel reinforced a central truth: Africa’s food security challenge requires African-led, fit-for-purpose solutions, designed for the continent’s climatic realities, farming systems, and market structures, not imported models retrofitted after the fact.

Building on this conviction, AAI is advancing its Food Security Accelerator Initiative, a flagship effort to bridge innovation, finance, and policy in support of scalable, climate-resilient agriculture. The Accelerator is designed to identify and support high-potential African solutions across AgriTech, Fintech, and value-chain innovation, while leveraging public climate finance to de-risk early deployment and crowd in private investment. Its focus is on solutions that deliver real adaptation outcomes for smallholder farmers, strengthen local and regional food systems, and align investor expectations with long-term resilience.

By convening policymakers, investors, entrepreneurs, and development partners around a shared adaptation agenda, AAI is helping shift the narrative from short-term pilots to systems-level impact, and from externally driven models to solutions built in Africa, for Africa, and led by Africans. In doing so, the Initiative continues to position adaptation not as a constraint on growth, but as a foundation for resilient, inclusive, and food-secure development across the continent.