Because the world commemorates World Meals Day 2025, Sterling Financial institution Ltd, certainly one of Nigeria’s main monetary establishments driving sustainable progress in the true economic system, has reaffirmed its dedication to constructing a resilient, inclusive, and food-secure Africa.
This yr’s World Meals Day, themed “Hand in Hand for Higher Meals and a Higher Future,” highlights the necessity for collective effort to make sure entry to secure, nutritious, and inexpensive meals for all, whereas selling sustainable livelihoods and defending the planet.
For Sterling Financial institution, the theme underscores a reality that has guided its work in agriculture: Africa’s meals future depends upon shared accountability between farmers, financiers, policymakers, and communities.
Talking on the event, the group head, Agriculture at Sterling Financial institution, Olushola Obikanye, emphasised the urgency of partnership-driven options to remodel Africa’s meals methods.
“The 2025 World Meals Day theme captures precisely what Africa wants proper now: collaboration. No single establishment or authorities can repair meals insecurity alone. We should work hand in hand with monetary establishments, know-how suppliers, farmers, improvement companions, and different key stakeholders to create a future the place starvation is historical past.”
“At Sterling Financial institution, we’ve seen what’s attainable when partnerships align with objective. Our dedication goes past financing as we’re serving to to construct an ecosystem the place farmers have entry to credit score, markets, and the information they should thrive. That’s how we will produce higher meals, enhance vitamin, and safe a greater future for generations to come back.”
“Meals safety should transfer from being a nationwide aspiration to a continental precedence. We’re sitting on 60 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, but Africa nonetheless imports billions of {dollars}’ value of meals yearly. This paradox can solely change by way of motion, funding, innovation, and inclusion.”
Over the previous decade, Sterling Financial institution has emerged as certainly one of Nigeria’s foremost financiers of agricultural improvement, channeling funding and experience into tasks that strengthen meals methods, improve productiveness, and empower communities.
The Financial institution has disbursed over N500 billion in loans to industrial farmers and greater than $300 million to assist agricultural worth chain actors throughout the nation. In 2022, it launched SWAY AgFin, a digital platform that has since enabled over 25,500 youth and ladies farmers to entry financing and market alternatives.
By partnerships with GIZ and USAID, Sterling Financial institution has carried out capacity-building programmes which have reached over 10,000 agribusinesses, enhancing competitiveness and sustainability, whereas additionally supporting over 100,000 rice, maize, and soybean farmers below the CBN Anchor Debtors’ Programme and SWAY AgFin.
Obikanye famous that these achievements are a product of Sterling Financial institution’s deliberate give attention to long-term agricultural transformation.
“Our technique is constructed on three pillars: empowerment, innovation, and sustainability. We’re empowering farmers by way of finance, innovating by way of know-how, and selling sustainability by way of climate-smart agriculture. The end result is not only higher yields, it’s higher livelihoods and stronger communities.”
Sterling Financial institution’s management in agricultural advocacy and funding will once more take centre stage on the upcoming Agriculture Summit Africa (ASA) 2025, scheduled for November 6–7, 2025, the place thought leaders and innovators will convene below the theme “Survival of the Greenest: Reclaiming Africa’s Meals Future.”
The summit, convened yearly by Sterling Financial institution, has turn into certainly one of Africa’s foremost platforms for driving sustainable agricultural coverage and funding. ASA 2025 will carry collectively policymakers, financiers, agribusiness leaders, and farmers to co-create sensible options for reaching a resilient, food-secure continent.
“World Meals Day and ASA 2025 are related by a single reality,” Obikanye concluded. “Africa’s meals future might be secured solely after we mix innovation, capital, and compassion to construct methods that feed our individuals and defend our planet.”
By its H.E.A.R.T. technique, specializing in Well being, Schooling, Agriculture, Renewable Power, and Transportation, Sterling Financial institution continues to drive investments that promote sustainable improvement, inclusive progress, and shared prosperity throughout Africa.
