Rice is a staple food in West Africa, with it being eaten at least once a day in many countries, including Sierra Leone, where it’s consumed three times a day when people can afford it. The dependence on imported rice has a significant price, with West Africa’s rice import bill reaching over $3.5 billion every year, according to the World Bank, which is as high as $5 billion.
Money leaves the region annually to buy a crop that it is well-placed to grow. The importation of rice also comes with risks, as seen in 2023 when India abruptly curbed its rice exports, leading to a jump in prices across the sub-region.
Growing Demand and Untapped Potential
Demand for rice is growing at 3 to 4% a year, while production has historically lagged behind, with West Africa consuming 22 to 24 million tons of milled rice annually but producing only about 60% of it. The region holds major irrigable river basins, growing consumer markets, and increasing political alignment around regional food sovereignty.
The Senegal River Valley, for example, has over 100,000 hectares of untapped irrigable potential on its Senegalese side, with yields reaching five to seven tons per hectare under irrigation compared to two tons under rainfed conditions. Similar potential can be found in Mali’s Office du Niger and Nigeria, where only 17% of the country’s 4.2 million hectares of cultivable rice land is irrigated today.
A formal multilateral River Basin Rice Compact, binding basin countries to shared governance, maintenance funding, and surplus trade protocols, could convert the region’s geography into a foundation for regional food security and broader economic growth. National rice strategies remain the foundation, but the regional opportunity is to connect them, investing in the basins that grow rice best, the mills and warehouses, and the corridors that move surplus dependably to deficit markets.
Investment and Coordination
There is appetite for investment in the sector, but a clear gap in coordination remains, with capital crowding into the same parts of the value chain, while seed systems, aggregation, working capital, and rural processing remain chronically underserved. The next chapter must be about investment at scale across the full value chain, not fragmented, piecemeal projects.
Related Post: Moove drives bulk of Africa’s August startup funding
Capital flows to opportunities that are de-risked and ready to deploy, and what the region needs is a pipeline built deliberately across irrigation rehabilitation, seed systems, farmer services, aggregation, processing, and market infrastructure, designed to close coordination gaps and crowd in private capital alongside public funding. A regional financing platform could give processors and aggregators access to the working capital, financing, and infrastructure they need to expand.
The West Africa Rice Investment Roundtable, convened in Accra this June, demonstrated that political commitment is real, with ministers from fourteen countries endorsing the Accra Declaration, and roughly $1.5 billion in early public and development financing pledged. ECOWAS’s ten-year rice roadmap, running to 2035, needs the commitments made in Accra, the roadmap itself, and the official data from the ECOWAS Rice Observatory to contribute to a shared view of investable projects and stated capital commitments.
Sierra Leone’s own experience shows what is possible, with rice self-sufficiency climbing to 73% in 2025, up from 56% in 2019, under the President’s flagship food-systems transformation program, Feed Salone, which translates to “Feed Sierra Leone”. The program has built both supply and demand, with investment in local production, duties on imported rice, and structured demand such as home-grown rice in school feeding, which now supplies 40% of what is served, up from 10% two years earlier.
The West Africa Integration and Investment Summit, to be hosted in Freetown this November, provides an opportunity to take the next step, aligning partners around the priority investment pipeline and agreeing on practical actions needed to turn regional ambition into investment at scale. The region has the land, the water, the rising demand, and the political momentum, but what is missing is the decision to move together, at scale, with governments setting the policy, finance institutions building the investment architecture, and the private sector bringing the capital and discipline to turn strategy into results.
Henry Musa Kpaka, minister of agriculture, forestry and food security in Sierra Leone, and Obai Khalifa, deputy director of agricultural development at the Gates Foundation, note that the region’s potential for rice production is significant, with the Senegal River being a key area for development. The region’s rice import bill is a significant burden, and investing in local production could help reduce this figure and improve food security.
