Enhancing Food Security Through Finance-Enabled Food Systems Transformation

Global food security challenges have evolved beyond ending hunger. While past efforts reduced dire hunger, today's urgent challenge is financing food systems transformation to ensure nutritious, affordable, and sustainably produced food reaches the billions who cannot afford healthy diets, and reversing the environmental damage imposed by current unsustainable agricultural practices. All while improving the livelihoods of those smallholders and agri-SME workers, mainly women, who produce and market most of this food.

Inclusive finance can become a transformative force for food security when aligned with food system transformation priorities. This working paper examines how inclusive finance can address today's food security challenges by unlocking targeted investments in high-impact agricultural value chains (AVCs) that best promote nutritional, sustainability, and livelihood outcomes through agricultural technology (agtech) adoption.