This framing paper is a key output for the joint AUDA-NEPAD and ECDPM initiative to assist African countries and regions in integrating climate and food policies and translating them into investment pipelines, with a specific focus on infrastructure and trade corridors – star ting with the Lobito, Nor thern and Abidjan-Lagos corridors. The overall framing is the need to link continental-level mechanisms for international cooperation, par tnerships and knowledge exchange with on-the-ground policy and investments.

The paper seeks to provide a framework for thinking about ways to strengthen and capitalise on the connections between food systems, climate resilience, infrastructure, investment and trade initiatives across the African continent. Its star ting point is the fragmented nature of the policy and investment approach to operating in these areas, where long-standing interests in transboundary corridors offer a means to concentrate all of these in practice.

Despite continental frameworks such as the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Plan (CAADP), the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA), the AU Climate Change and Resilient Development Strategy and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), there is limited coordination in terms of the related policies and their implementation.

AUDA‑NEPAD’s role in this initiative therefore goes beyond policy framing, to positioning the agency as a continental broker that links African priorities to implementable, investment‑ready actions along strategic corridors. Building on its mandates under CAADP, PIDA and the AU Climate Change Strategy, AUDA‑NEPAD is uniquely placed to convene ministries, Regional Economic Communities (RECs), corridor authorities, financiers and private actors to align fragmented policy frameworks and translate them into coordinated investment pipelines.

In the context of corridors such as the Nor thern, Lobito and Abidjan-Lagos Corridors, AUDA‑NEPAD’s comparative advantage lies in bridging continental frameworks with corridor‑specific political economy realities, while safeguarding African agency in engagements with external partners and investors.

While understandable from an institutional perspective, where different sectoral needs and logics shape policies, failure to build on cross-sector linkages risks undermining the effor ts to improve food security, climate resilience and inclusive growth. By way of example, agricultural and food systems plans under CAADP are often not aligned with the Nationally Determined Contributions on climate change (and vice versa), while infrastructure projects rarely consider smallholder farmers’ and micro, small and medium enterprises’ inclusion or climate aspects. Similarly, the AfCFTA’s potential to strengthen food security is undermined by barriers around trade policy implementation and non-tariff barrier removal (Van Gass, 2025). Beyond policy fragmentation, there is also a disconnect between national, regional and continental strategy policy levels. This leads to a disjointed approach that cuts horizontally and ver tically, requiring innovative, bottom-up solutions. The corridors approach, as discussed here, is a potential way to bridge both policy areas and levels in the practical design and implementation of policies and investment projects.

This framing paper therefore seeks to lay out an approach to overcome the policy fragmentation and to improve their connections in policy and in practice to achieve investments that foster competitive trade by improving systems efficiency. This approach will help to reduce risk and increase returns for investors both private and public. Africa is the continent that suffers most both from climate change and food insecurity. African agricultural productivity is 60% below the global average while approximately 65% of the continent’s farmland is degraded. As a consequence, food imports are projected to cost the continent US$110- billion annually by 2030. At the same time, Africa is home to around one-fifth of the global agricultural workforce and is projected to have a population of 2.4-billion and be home to 40% of migrants displaced by climate shocks by 2050. This leads some to suggest that the agri-food systems in Africa are “[the] single sector [that] holds the key to closing half of the outstanding sustainable development gaps” (Lamy, Kalibata, Mayaki, 2025).