Benguela, Angola
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you, Deputy Secretary [Richard] Verma, for those remarks and for the incredible partnership that the United States is building through our diplomacy, our development, and of course, even our defense relationship. I am immensely grateful to be here with Minister Ana Neto, Minister Ricardo d’Abreu, and Minister Antonio Assis, as well as of course the Vice Governor of Benguela [Lídia Celma Gonçalves Machado Amaro].
USAID and the United States feels really privileged to be building on the leadership and the creativity of people here who have been doing this kind of work for years and years. One of the very fresh and important aspects of our partnership is that it is a public-private partnership. We are grateful to our private sector partners who we have heard from, and who we work with: ExxonMobil, Grupo Carrinho, Africell, and Afrimoney. Together, we are trying to seize the opportunity that the transformational investments along the Lobito Corridor are going to create for local communities.
Angola is a blessed country. It is blessed with immense agricultural resources, and its large swaths of fertile land helped its exports from sugarcane to cotton to coffee, become famous around the world. Years ago this agricultural production was powered largely by family smallholder farmers, and women farmers played a crucial and often unrecognized role. But Angolan communities have often not fully benefited from these blessed resources.
Until 1975, of course, it was Angola's colonial rulers that generally reaped the benefits of agricultural trade. And once Angola finally won its independence, the devastating civil war displaced more than four million people, and damaged infrastructure that could have helped smallholder farmers transport their crops to market.
As families left in droves for coastal areas, resources invested in farming communities dwindled, and eventually, so did these farmers' crops. So despite this incredible bounty of land, fertile land, today, Angola imports more than half of its food supply. Annual food costs run as high as $3 billion. But as we've heard today, Angola is on a new path. The rehabilitation of the Lobito Railway and our larger effort together to extend it through Zambia and connect to Tanzania, which will result in the first trans African railway, has such huge potential to change the trajectory for the Angolan people.
This rail initiative is so much more than a railroad. It can connect farmers with markets where they can sell more of their goods. And it will not only expand their access to critical inputs like fertilizer, improved seeds, and farm equipment, but it will also bring down the prices of those critical inputs, increasing the profit margin for the farmer. Farmers will be able to supercharge their productivity. Angola can become an agricultural powerhouse. Angola can lift communities out of hunger, not only here at home, but also abroad.
In order to seize this generational opportunity, those farmers need training in the techniques that can increase their yields. They need financial resources, access to capital to be able to buy seeds, fertilizer, new equipment. They need access to documents like birth certificates and national identification cards. They need basic skills like literacy in the first instance and financial literacy. And they need connections with more buyers to whom they can sell their goods.
So the Angolan government has invested tens of millions of dollars into supporting smallholder farmers, including by working with the Agricultural Development Support Fund to expand access to loans for farmers, which is predicted to increase annual agricultural production by six percent for the next three years.
And as you just heard from Nelson [Carrinho], Grupo Carrinho, Angola’s largest food company, is connecting 150,000 farmers with 17 factories across the country – factories that can purchase the farmers' harvest and increase their incomes. The U.S. government is very excited to be part of supporting this effort.
We have launched a partnership with Africell, a two year $4.8 million digital finance project to expand access to financial services to farmers. USAID has partnered with local NGOs, as you heard, to launch agricultural technical institutes like the one we've just encountered farmers who are a part of, to train farmers, especially women, in order to help them increase their yields.
As part of the Feed the Future program, USAID and the State Department are implementing what is called VACS – the Vision for Adaptive Crops and Soil. And this will help farmers invest in indigenous crops, withstand climate change, and preserve soil health. And in partnership with ExxonMobil, AZULE Energy, and Grupo Simples, USAID has launched a program to tackle the very specific barriers encountered by women farmers.
This program helps women get access to those critical identification documents, access to basic literacy – we heard from two women farmers who had been trained and learned how to read and write through the program, and helps these farmers sell their harvests to new markets.
USAID initially committed $1 million and we were able, with our private sector partners, they contributed an additional $1.5 million and together we supported women farmers across six provinces.
Six thousand women so far have been reached and have improved their agricultural practices. And the proof we need for why this is such a smart investment, we already have. Corn harvests, at supported farms through this public private partnership, are more than three times as large as they were three years ago. The income generated on farms owned by these supported women farmers has grown on average by nearly six times.
We know what works, we simply have to work together to scale it. I am pleased to share today that USAID is now building on this impactful program by investing an additional $5 million dollars in the Women in Angola Farmers Initiative. And this is going to bolster our support for women farmers along the Lobito Corridor – in Huambo, Bié, Cuando Cubango, and right here in Benguela. And I'm really pleased to say that Grupo Carrinho and Africell are joining as well to connect women farmers to markets across Africa and help them more easily get access to their profits.
Together, we are going to expand our support to a total of 20,000 women farmers across Angola. And again, remember, the Lobito Railway is so much more than a railway. In helping farming communities along the Lobito Corridor, we will be helping them take advantage of the new logistics and transportation possibilities.
On behalf of the United States, I join Deputy Secretary Verma in just expressing gratitude to you for extending the hand of partnership. We feel really, really privileged to be part of what is going to be a transformational generational effort.
As we had the chance to share with President [João] Lourenço yesterday, we really do believe, as the United States, that when it comes to the U.S.-Angolan partnership, only the sky is the limit.