Gates Promised to Halve Hunger in Africa. Twenty Years Later, It Climbed.

Twenty years ago, Bill Gates decided to get heavily involved in how the continent of Africa feeds its inhabitants. Through the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), launched by the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, AGRA promised to cut hunger in half and double crop yields and farmer incomes in some of the poorest countries on earth. The plan was to pull farmers away from their traditional methods of farming, and introduce them to commercial seeds, toxic chemical fertilizer, and a market system that Gates insisted would lift millions out of poverty. Yet, two decades and well over a billion dollars later, the results of Gates experiment are in. And they are not the results that we were sold.

The money alone proves that the plan Gates has crafted for Africa is more than a humanitarian project for the greater good of society. AGRA took in more than a billion dollars in donations over its two decades, most of it, of course, from the Gates Foundation. Which, by its own accounting, put in about $1.3 billion, though critics watching the entire endeavor put the grand total well over $1.5 billion. And donations were only part of the equation. Heavily persuaded to buy into Gates model, governments in Africa were pushed to subsidize the very seeds and fertilizer that the program was built around, which is an estimated $1 billion per year in target countries, paid out of national treasuries in some of the poorest places on earth. So, obviously, Gates never intended this project to serve as a test pilot or a cautious trial. No indeed. Instead, it was a long, expensive gamble. One that was heavily underwritten by Africans themselves, promising that Western inputs and open markets would be the golden ticket to finally end their hunger.

Timothy Wise, a senior research fellow at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute, where he founded and directed its Globalization and Sustainable Development Program, has now analyzed 18 years of data, from 2006 through 2024, from the United Nations (UN) and World Bank for the 13 African countries targeted by AGRA. With the fullest scorecard yet on a program still running, Wise found that fertilizer use more than doubled. Farmland expanded by 46%. And staple yields rose about 25%. Staple yields did not double. In other words, yield growth did not speed up under AGRA. Instead, it slipped from 1.3% a year before Gates’s program to 1.2% during it, and to about 0.4% in the most recent years. The full analysis is here.

Yes, the crop-related numbers are bad considering the massive funding, but the hunger number is much worse. Across those countries, the number of chronically undernourished people rose 58% to about 150 million. Hunger also rose by about 60% across sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, so, AGRA cannot be blamed for every empty plate. Still, what the group cannot claim is the very thing promised by Gates, which is that hunger would be cut in half. Instead, it rose across the entire continent. Think about it. AGRA nations did barely better than the sub-Saharan average, which points out that a billion-dollar program forced by Bill Gates massively failed. AGRA’s own twenty-year review admits that hunger has risen, that farmers are not prospering, and that the gains (or lack of them) “have not added up to transformation.” As reported by USRTK, even the evaluation the Gates Foundation itself paid for, back in 2022, found no evidence that the program was hitting its promised goals on income and food security.

And guess what? Follow the grants and the picture gets even less charitable. An audit by GRAIN of Gates’s food and agriculture funding through 2020 found that the foundation routed a large portion of its money through institutions in the United States and Europe. Of the grants that did not go to a select few giant vehicles like CGIAR and AGRA itself, 82% went to groups that were based in North America and Europe. Hmm. Less than one dollar in ten actually went to organizations in Africa, the nation Gates professed to fix. Apparently, African farmers were the test population. Not where the majority of the money ended up.

The money trail running down to the farm reveals Gates’s master plan to reshape what farmers planted in the ground. AGRA’s entire model is built on subsidies, cheap fertilizer, discounted seed, and on government farm advisors sent farm to farm to promote them. But those subsidies were not evenly spread across every crop a farmer might plant. Not by a long shot. Instead, they flowed to a short list of favored crops, above all, maize (corn). Thus, under the plan, the choice for a struggling farmer became painfully obvious. They planted crops that offered government funding to purchase the seeds and fertilizer. And the land shifted accordingly. In Zambia, the area planted with traditional grains like millet fell 42% and sorghum production dropped 62%, even as fertilizer use there jumped 155% and maize yields crept up a measly 14%. Those traditional crops were not relics. They tolerate drought and thin soil, and they put more starch on the plate. As we’ve previously reported, African farmers were steadily and repeatedly talked out of planting the diverse crops that fed them well and coerced into a dependence on commercial seed and fertilizer that they must purchase, season after season, from the companies they do not own and cannot control. Instead, they are controlled by these companies.

But Gates didn’t just go after the farmers with his project. He went after the law, country by country. For generations, African farmers have saved seed from one harvest to plant in the next and swapped and sold it amongst themselves. This is not a marginal habit. That informal system, farmers keeping and trading their own seed, still supplies roughly 80% of what gets planted across the region, and is how most of the continent actually feeds itself. AGRA-backed campaigns pushed governments to change that, pressing for seed laws written so that only officially registered, company-sold seed could be legally traded, which turned the ordinary act of sharing farm-saved seed into a crime.

In Kenya, a 2012 law meant to curb counterfeit seed made selling or sharing uncertified seed punishable by up to two years in prison and a fine of a million shillings. It also gave inspectors the power to raid community seed banks and seize what they found. The effect was surreal. Seed sellers in open-air markets, as described by the head of the Seed Savers Network, began operating as if they were criminals trafficking in illegal drugs, with women hiding under seed sacks and secretly measuring them out with spoons and bottle tops so they weren’t caught selling seed. In November 2025, a high court struck the provisions down as unconstitutional, ruling that putting farmers in jail for selling seed violated the right to be free from hunger. Finally! A voice of common sense. The Kenyan government is appealing the decision, but so far, the courts have let the ruling stand.

Still, none of these Gates-initiated moves were inevitable, and Senegal is proof of that. Maintaining a wide variety of crops and relying far less on the commercial seed-and-fertilizer package pushed by Gates, Senegal has never been an AGRA country. And over the very same timeframe that hunger climbed across the AGRA nations, Senegal cut its number of malnourished citizens roughly in half. The exact goal that AGRA set and missed. Go figure. But that is not all. Senegal’s staple yields also rose sharply, by 73% compared to AGRA’s 25%. Senegal is not a perfect experiment on what really works in Africa. It has more irrigation, different politics, and a different farm economy. Nonetheless, it clearly underscores a question that AGRA has never been able to answer. How did a country stay out of the Gates model yet deliver the results the model promised and failed to deliver itself?

In 2022, hundreds of African faith leaders told Bill Gates that his model was deepening the crisis at hand. In 2024, they asked for reparations. Guess what? The foundation and AGRA has not answered that demand in public. A company doing dirty deeds like this loses customers and a government this wrong can, in theory, be voted out. But a private foundation richer than most nations does not face either. It can miss its own targets for 20 years, hear from the people it claims it wants to help as they state it is indeed not helping, watch hunger rise, and keep forging on with the next grant. As the number of African farmers with work to count on shrank, AGRA’s spending on executive compensation quadrupled between 2021 and 2024, to nearly $4 million. That is the crime that the yield table fails to capture.