Every economic shock should leave Africa with more productive capability than it found.
Africa is once again confronting an economic shock whose origins lie largely beyond the continent. On 1 September 2026, the African Development Bank approved a new Global Energy and Fertilizer Crisis Response Framework capable of mobilising up to US$5.1 billion to help African countries manage rising energy, fertilizer and food costs associated with disruptions in global markets. The intervention combines additional African Development Bank lending with resources from the African Development Fund and is intended both to provide immediate support and strengthen the continent’s resilience to future disruptions.
There is nothing unusual about the need for such an intervention. Governments and development institutions are expected to respond when essential commodities become scarce or expensive. Farmers cannot postpone planting seasons while policymakers develop ten-year industrial strategies. Families cannot wait for new factories to be constructed before food prices are stabilised. Emergency intervention is therefore necessary.
But the announcement should provoke a much larger conversation about Africa’s economic development.
Over the past several years, the continent has experienced a succession of external shocks. COVID-19 exposed Africa’s dependence on external pharmaceutical and medical supply chains. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted grain and fertilizer markets. Energy-price volatility has repeatedly exposed countries dependent on imported petroleum products. Shipping disruptions have raised the cost of essential goods. Global financial tightening has made capital more expensive.
Each crisis has been different. Yet they repeatedly expose the same structural reality: too many things essential to African economies remain dependent upon productive systems over which African countries exercise limited control.
The challenge, therefore, is no longer simply how effectively Africa responds when the next crisis arrives. The more important question is whether each crisis leaves Africa less vulnerable than it found it. That distinction should fundamentally change how we think about economic resilience.
Africa Has Become Good at Recovering
Africa has demonstrated considerable capacity to respond to emergencies. Governments mobilise resources. Development banks establish facilities. International institutions provide financing. Supply chains are rerouted. Import programmes are expanded. Subsidies are introduced. Farmers receive inputs. Eventually, markets begin to stabilise.
The African Development Bank itself provides an important example. Following disruption to global grain and fertilizer markets after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Bank established the African Emergency Food Production Facility. The programme was designed to support farmers with fertilizer, improved seed and other inputs while protecting African food production from rapidly deteriorating global conditions.
According to the Bank, the programme eventually supported millions of farmers across dozens of African countries and contributed to tens of millions of tonnes of food production.
Those interventions mattered and without them, the economic and humanitarian consequences of the disruption could have been considerably worse, but what lessons did we as a continent learn from this? Did that emergency response trigger any meaningful restructuring within our economies to support an economic transformation to prevent such a crisis from happening again?
An economy can recover from a crisis while retaining precisely the vulnerability that allowed the crisis to damage it in the first place. Supplies return. Prices stabilise. Production resumes. Governments declare success. Yet the underlying structure of the economy remains largely unchanged. Then another disruption occurs, another emergency facility is created, another financing package is mobilised and another recovery begins.
It seems we are not learning and if we are not careful, Africa risks becoming increasingly sophisticated at recovering back into vulnerability. This is not a criticism of emergency intervention. It is an argument that emergency intervention should increasingly become the beginning of something larger.
The developmental question should not end with, “Did we survive the shock?” It should continue to ask, “What did we become capable of doing because the shock happened?”
A Crisis Is Also an Economic Diagnostic
One of the most useful ways to think about an economic crisis is to regard it as a diagnostic exercise. A crisis reveals where an economy is fragile.
COVID-19 did not create Africa’s pharmaceutical manufacturing weakness. It exposed it. When global demand for masks, protective equipment, medicines, diagnostic products and vaccines surged simultaneously, African countries discovered how dangerous it was to depend heavily on production systems located elsewhere.
The disruption of Black Sea grain markets did not create Africa’s food-system vulnerabilities. It exposed the extent to which countries with enormous agricultural potential could still become vulnerable when grain or fertilizer supplies from distant regions were interrupted.
Energy shocks do the same thing. They expose economies that remain heavily dependent on imported petroleum products or unreliable electricity systems.
Fertilizer shortages reveal weaknesses in agricultural-input production, financing, logistics and distribution.
Every crisis therefore carries information. It tells us something about what our economies cannot yet do. This is why Africa should begin asking a different question whenever an external disruption creates an internal emergency: What capability does this crisis reveal that we have failed to build?
That question moves us from crisis management toward development because the real problem is not simply that something happened somewhere else in the world. External shocks are inevitable. Wars will happen. Commodity prices will fluctuate. Pandemics will emerge. Shipping routes will be disrupted. Technologies will change.
The structural problem exists when events thousands of kilometres away can repeatedly threaten essential African economic functions because the continent lacks sufficient alternative productive capacity.
Resilience must therefore mean more than surviving disruption, it must mean progressively reducing the number of external disruptions capable of becoming African emergencies.
The Resilience-Conversion Gap
This leads us to what I believe is an important concept for understanding African economic development: the Resilience-Conversion Gap.
The Resilience-Conversion Gap is the distance between the resources mobilised to survive an economic shock and the permanent productive capability created before the next shock arrives.
Consider what happens when hundreds of millions or billions of dollars are mobilised in response to fertilizer shortages. Conventional measures of success understandably focus on immediate outcomes such as, how much fertilizer reached farmers, how many farmers received support, whether planting continued, whether food production was protected and whether prices stabilised.
Those are essential measures, but they are incomplete measures of resilience. A second set of questions should follow. Did domestic fertilizer distribution become stronger? Was additional storage capacity built? Did local blending expand? Were African fertilizer manufacturers strengthened? Did new agricultural-input companies emerge? Were trade-finance mechanisms created that will remain available after the crisis? Did local agronomy and soil-testing capability improve? Did countries establish stronger regional supply relationships? Did entrepreneurs enter parts of the value chain previously dominated entirely by imports?
Ultimately, the question becomes remarkably simple: What dependency disappeared because we spent the money?
If billions are mobilised to survive a crisis and the same dependency produces essentially the same emergency five years later, then the intervention may have succeeded as relief without fully succeeding as transformation.
This distinction matters because Africa cannot eliminate external shocks, but what it can change is the degree to which those shocks become domestic crises.
From Recovery to Productive Resilience
We therefore need to extend the conventional crisis-response sequence. Most emergency interventions move through three recognisable stages: shock, relief and recovery.
The shock occurs. Governments and institutions mobilise relief. Eventually, markets stabilise and the economy recovers.
But a developmental response requires two additional stages: capability and resilience.
The first three stages return an economy toward where it was before the disruption. The fourth stage deliberately changes what the economy is capable of doing. The fifth ensures that when a similar shock occurs again, the consequences are less severe.
This is the difference between recovery and transformation.
After the immediate emergency has been contained, policymakers should ask which factories should exist that do not exist today; which enterprises need strengthening; which technologies should be acquired; which skills must be developed; which financing mechanisms should become permanent; which infrastructure bottlenecks must be removed; and which regional supply chains need to be constructed.
These are not emergency questions, they are productive-capability questions. Yet if they are not asked during and immediately after emergencies, the political urgency that makes structural change possible can quickly disappear once the crisis subsides.
A successful emergency response should therefore contain the seeds of its own future irrelevance. The ultimate success of a fertilizer emergency facility should be that, over time, fewer countries require such a facility when the next disruption occurs.
Fertilizer Is Not Just a Product. It Is a Productive System.
The current fertilizer crisis provides a useful illustration because fertilizer is often discussed as though it were simply a commodity that needs to be purchased and delivered to farmers. It is much more than that.
Behind a bag of fertilizer sits an entire economic system. There are raw materials, chemical processing facilities, manufacturers, blending plants, laboratories, logistics companies, ports, warehouses, wholesalers, agro-dealers, banks, trade-finance providers, agronomists, soil scientists, digital platforms and farmers.
When African countries become vulnerable to fertilizer shortages, the problem therefore does not necessarily sit at one point in the chain. It may reflect weaknesses across several parts of this productive system.
That also means there are several levels through which capability can develop.
An economy may begin primarily as an importer. But importing itself can support the development of sophisticated distribution, logistics, warehousing and agricultural retail networks. Those capabilities can eventually support local fertilizer blending, allowing products to be adapted more closely to local crops and soil conditions. Countries with appropriate resources and economics may move further into manufacturing. As scientific and technological capability develops, local firms and research institutions can increasingly participate in agronomy, soil mapping, customised plant nutrition and new fertilizer technologies. Eventually, some enterprises may become exporters.
Morocco demonstrates what the deeper end of this value chain can look like. OCP Group has developed capabilities extending from phosphate mining through chemical processing and fertilizer manufacturing to agronomy and customised plant nutrition. Its significance to the continent is not merely the volume of fertilizer it produces. It demonstrates what happens when a country moves progressively deeper into the knowledge, technology and enterprise architecture surrounding a natural resource.
The lesson, however, is not that every African country should attempt to reproduce Morocco.
That would be economically inefficient and strategically misguided. The more important lesson is that resilience comes from productive depth.
Africa Does Not Need 54 Fertilizer Industries
There is a danger that arguments for African productive capability can easily collapse into simplistic calls for every country to manufacture everything it consumes.
That is not the objective. Africa does not need 54 separate fertilizer industries, 54 pharmaceutical industries producing every medicine, or 54 countries attempting to manufacture every component required by their economies.
The stronger model is regional specialisation connected through continental trade, with the AfCFTA as the pillar.
Some African countries possess natural gas that can support nitrogen fertilizer production. Others possess significant phosphate deposits. Some have established chemical industries. Others have strong ports and logistics systems. Some may specialise in fertilizer blending. Others can develop agronomy, agricultural technology, distribution or financing capabilities. The strategic objective should therefore be to connect these capabilities.
The deeper opportunity of African economic integration is not simply allowing finished products to cross borders more easily. It is enabling African countries to specialise in different stages of production while participating in shared continental value chains.
A fertilizer used by a farmer in Zambia, for example, need not be manufactured entirely in Zambia to represent African productive resilience. Its raw materials might originate in one African country, processing may occur in another, blending in Zambia, financing through an African institution and distribution through locally owned enterprises.
That is not dependency. That is continental interdependence built upon African productive capability.
Every Dependency Is Also an Entrepreneurial Signal
The discussion eventually brings us to the entrepreneur. When shortages occur, entrepreneurs respond. Prices change, demand rises and businesses search for ways to supply what the market requires.
The most immediate entrepreneurial response to a fertilizer shortage may simply be to find fertilizer somewhere else, import it and sell it. That function is useful. Traders help markets adjust to disruption. But Africa needs another category of entrepreneur: the entrepreneur who looks beyond the shortage itself and asks what productive weakness the shortage has revealed.
Perhaps the missing capability is fertilizer blending. Perhaps it is warehousing. Perhaps it is trade finance. Perhaps it is agricultural logistics. Perhaps it is soil testing. Perhaps it is digital distribution. Perhaps it is local manufacturing. Perhaps it is organic nutrient production. Perhaps it is financing for small agro-dealers. Perhaps it is technology that helps farmers use fertilizer more efficiently.
A persistent shortage is therefore not merely evidence of scarcity; it is market intelligence. It reveals something people need that the existing productive system cannot reliably provide. Every persistent dependency potentially points toward an enterprise that has not yet been built.
This is where entrepreneurship becomes central to resilience. Governments can establish policy. Development banks can mobilise finance. Universities can conduct research. Infrastructure can be constructed. But somebody ultimately has to organise people, capital, technology and knowledge around the identified opportunity.
We Need More Entrepreneurs, Not Merely More Traders of Scarcity
This is where the doctrine that Africa needs more entrepreneurs acquires a deeper meaning. The argument is not simply that Africa needs more people registering companies or participating in self-employment. Nor is it that every shortage should become an opportunity for somebody to make money.
Crises can create enormous arbitrage opportunities. People able to obtain scarce products can profit by reselling them at higher prices. That is entrepreneurial activity in the broadest sense, but it does not necessarily build productive capability.
The entrepreneur Africa particularly needs is the one capable of asking a different question: What can I build so that this shortage becomes less likely? That is productive entrepreneurship.
Emergency Finance Should Leave Productive Assets Behind
This brings us back to the African Development Bank’s US$5.1 billion response framework. The relevant question is not whether the Bank should intervene. It should. Immediate suffering cannot be sacrificed in pursuit of long-term economic theory.
The stronger question is what remains when the intervention ends. Africa should increasingly expect major crisis-response programmes to contain an explicit productive-conversion objective.
This does not mean every emergency dollar should be redirected into factories. Relief must remain relief. Farmers need fertilizer now. Households need food now. Energy systems must continue functioning now.
But alongside emergency-response indicators should sit productive-capability indicators.
Success should not only be measured by how much fertilizer was supplied, but by how much African fertilizer capability was strengthened. Not only by how many farmers received inputs, but by how many sustainable agricultural-input enterprises were created or expanded. Not only by how much emergency trade finance was deployed, but by which financing mechanisms became permanent. Not only by how quickly supply chains recovered, but by how much more diversified and resilient those supply chains became.
This is the bridge Africa must construct between development finance and industrial transformation.
The Real Measure of Resilience
There will be another global crisis. There will be another war, another shipping disruption, another climate shock, another commodity-price movement or another technological disruption that reorganises global supply chains.
Africa cannot control all of these events, but Africa can progressively change what those events mean for African economies. That is the real meaning of resilience.
Resilience is the accumulation of sufficient productive capability, enterprise depth, institutional strength and regional interconnectedness that external disruption becomes progressively less capable of producing internal catastrophe. That should become one of the tests applied to every major African crisis.
After COVID-19, what pharmaceutical capabilities became permanently stronger? After the grain crisis, what changed in African food production? After fertilizer disruption, what changed in agricultural-input systems? After energy shocks, what changed in energy production and distribution?
If the answer is repeatedly “very little,” then Africa is not converting crisis into development. It is financing recovery without financing transformation and that is something the continent cannot continue indefinitely.
Every Crisis Must Leave Africa More Capable
The African Development Bank’s latest intervention therefore represents more than a US$5.1 billion financing story. It presents Africa with a developmental choice.
We can use the resources required to navigate another difficult global period, restore supply and eventually return to normal. Or we can ask whether “normal” itself contains vulnerabilities that should no longer be acceptable.
Protect the farmer today, secure fertilizer supplies today, stabilise vulnerable economies today, but while doing so, build the enterprises, financing mechanisms, regional supply chains, skills and productive capabilities that make tomorrow’s disruption less dangerous.
If the same dependency creates the same emergency again, then however successful our recovery may have appeared, we returned to the place from which we started.
Africa cannot keep financing the same emergency twice. Every crisis should leave us more capable than it found us.
Dr Luckmore Kudakwashe, is the Founder of The Next Africa Initiative, a pan-African platform committed to developing better entrepreneurs, stronger enterprises and enduring institutions across the continent. Known as The African Entrepreneurship Evangelist, he writes and speaks on entrepreneurship, enterprise building, business leadership and Africa’s economic transformation.
He is the author of THE NEXT AFRICA: A Road Map and Blueprint for a New Generation of African Entrepreneurship, which advances a vision for an Africa transformed through a new generation of purpose-driven entrepreneurs capable of building consequential enterprises and enduring institutions.
