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The year 2025 was a year of grounding and recalibration for ANAPRI. It was a year in which we deliberately leaned into substance over spectacle, and relevance over reach. At a time of tightening funding, growing uncertainty, and rising expectations from governments and partners, we made conscious choices about where to focus our collective energy and what kind of network we want ANAPRI to be.
Soil health emerged as one of the defining anchors of our work in 2025. Not as an abstract technical issue, but as a foundational constraint to productivity, resilience, and farmer livelihoods across the continent. Through our engagement in continental and country-level soil health conversations, ANAPRI increasingly positioned itself as a policy voice that connects soil science to farmer decisions, national priorities, and system-wide reform. This reinforced a core lesson for the network: evidence only matters when it speaks directly to the problems policymakers and farmers are confronting today.
In parallel, the continued maturation of the Policy Prioritization through Value Chain Analysis (PPVC) approach, developed and implemented in partnership with BFAP and IFPRI, marked a second major pillar of the year. PPVC is no longer just a methodological contribution. It is increasingly being applied as a practical policy tool that helps governments confront hard choices around productivity constraints, public investment trade-offs, and competitiveness in regional and global markets, while explicitly identifying where private sector investment can be unlocked and where policy and regulatory bottlenecks are constraining value chain performance. During 2025, PPVC tools were applied to inform policy dialogue in Zambia’s beef and soya value chains and in Ghana for rice value chain, while also enabling ANAPRI centres to track and trace the uptake and influence of policy recommendations in Malawi, Kenya, and Tanzania. These applications supported more structured engagement between governments and private sector actors around issues such as input markets, logistics, standards, and market access, and helped clarify where targeted policy reforms can crowd in investment rather than substitute for it. Just as importantly, this work has pushed ANAPRI centres to sharpen their value proposition to governments, moving from research producers to trusted policy partners. This has been central to our broader objective of making ANAPRI centres more valued, more visible, and more embedded in national decision-making processes.
Across all of this, 2025 reminded us that credibility is built through proximity. Getting our feet dirty, spending more time with farmers, policymakers, and value-chain actors, and engaging in sustained dialogue rather than episodic consultations strengthened both the quality and the uptake of our evidence. Some of our centres advanced this approach by strengthening engagement through Policy Liaison Desks, embedding staff within relevant ministries of agriculture to support sustained, day-to-day interaction with policymakers. The network learned, sometimes the hard way, that influence does not come from reports alone, but from being present, responsive, and grounded in real-world constraints.
As we look to 2026, the emphasis shifts from consolidation to innovation and scale. The Farmer Know Your Soil initiative will take clearer shape, not as a stand-alone campaign, but as a practical entry point for linking soil intelligence to farmer behaviour, advisory systems, markets, and policy reform. PPVC II will build on early lessons and move into deeper country and value-chain deep dives, generating more actionable and monitorable policy and investment pathways. These efforts will respond directly to Africa’s most pressing challenges, including persistent productivity hurdles, climate and input-use inefficiencies, and the growing urgency of trade competitiveness at regional and global levels. Building on the momentum from 2025, PPVC work will expand into new country contexts, including Nigeria and Ethiopia.
The year ahead will also see the induction of new centres in the Horn of Africa and North Africa, extending ANAPRI’s reach into regions that are central to continental food security, trade corridors, and geopolitical dynamics. In parallel, we will intentionally build new partnerships around critical issues shaping Africa’s agrifood systems, particularly productivity growth, food and input trade, and the policy reforms required to unlock domestic and regional markets.
At the heart of all this remains evidence, but evidence with purpose. Evidence that turns wheels. Evidence that supports home-grown solutions rooted in African realities rather than imported templates. Evidence that is learned, tested, adapted, and refined through practice.
We are deeply grateful to the partners who stayed with ANAPRI through a difficult funding and operating environment, who believed in the network’s long-term vision, and who invested not only in outputs, but in institutional strength, learning, and trust. Your continued partnership helped ANAPRI weather the storm and emerge more focused and resilient.
Looking ahead, ANAPRI enters 2026 with a clear sense that the next phase of our journey must be intentional, strategic, and bold. The coming year will mark a moment of institutional renewal. We will undertake a comprehensive review of our strategic direction and launch a new ANAPRI Strategy for 2027–2031, firmly grounded in the lessons of recent years, responsive to a changing continental and global context, and focused on where ANAPRI can add the greatest value.
As part of this renewal, we will also announce a new Board of Directors and transition to a leaner, more effective governance structure. This shift is not about formality, but about focus: a Board that is fit for purpose, strategically engaged, and able to guide ANAPRI through its next phase of growth, influence, and sustainability.
Together, these steps signal a network that is evolving with confidence. ANAPRI is moving forward as a community of practice that is closer to farmers and policymakers, more decisive in tackling Africa’s productivity and trade challenges, and more disciplined in turning evidence into action. The direction is clear: a stronger, more agile ANAPRI, anchored in African realities, shaping policy choices that matter, and contributing meaningfully to a more productive, resilient, and sovereign African food system.