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As the satellite commemorates World Food Day 2025, Sterling Bank Ltd, 1 of Nigeria’s starring fiscal institutions driving sustainable maturation successful the existent economy, has reaffirmed its committedness to gathering a resilient, inclusive, and food-secure Africa.
This year’s World Food Day, themed “Hand successful Hand for Better Food and a Better Future,” highlights the request for corporate effort to guarantee entree to safe, nutritious, and affordable nutrient for all, portion promoting sustainable livelihoods and protecting the planet.
For Sterling Bank, the taxable underscores a information that has guided its enactment successful agriculture: Africa’s nutrient destiny depends connected shared work betwixt farmers, financiers, policymakers, and communities.
Speaking connected the occasion, the radical head, Agriculture astatine Sterling Bank, Olushola Obikanye, emphasised the urgency of partnership-driven solutions to alteration Africa’s nutrient systems.
“The 2025 World Food Day taxable captures precisely what Africa needs close now: collaboration. No azygous instauration oregon authorities tin hole nutrient insecurity alone. We indispensable enactment manus successful manus with fiscal institutions, exertion providers, farmers, improvement partners, and different cardinal stakeholders to make a aboriginal wherever hunger is history.”
“At Sterling Bank, we’ve seen what’s imaginable erstwhile partnerships align with purpose. Our committedness goes beyond financing arsenic we are helping to physique an ecosystem wherever farmers person entree to credit, markets, and the cognition they request to thrive. That is however we tin nutrient amended food, amended nutrition, and unafraid a amended aboriginal for generations to come.”
“Food information indispensable determination from being a nationalist aspiration to a continental priority. We are sitting connected 60 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, yet Africa inactive imports billions of dollars’ worthy of nutrient annually. This paradox tin lone alteration done action, investment, innovation, and inclusion.”
Over the past decade, Sterling Bank has emerged arsenic 1 of Nigeria’s foremost financiers of cultivation development, channeling backing and expertise into projects that fortify nutrient systems, heighten productivity, and empower communities.
The Bank has disbursed implicit N500 cardinal successful loans to commercialized farmers and much than $300 cardinal to enactment cultivation worth concatenation actors crossed the country. In 2022, it launched SWAY AgFin, a integer level that has since enabled implicit 25,500 younker and women farmers to entree financing and marketplace opportunities.
Through partnerships with GIZ and USAID, Sterling Bank has implemented capacity-building programmes that person reached implicit 10,000 agribusinesses, enhancing competitiveness and sustainability, portion besides supporting implicit 100,000 rice, maize, and soybean farmers nether the CBN Anchor Borrowers’ Programme and SWAY AgFin.
Obikanye noted that these achievements are a merchandise of Sterling Bank’s deliberate absorption connected semipermanent cultivation transformation.
“Our strategy is built connected 3 pillars: empowerment, innovation, and sustainability. We are empowering farmers done finance, innovating done technology, and promoting sustainability done climate-smart agriculture. The effect is not conscionable amended yields, it’s amended livelihoods and stronger communities.”
Sterling Bank’s enactment successful cultivation advocacy and concern volition again instrumentality centre signifier astatine the upcoming Agriculture Summit Africa (ASA) 2025, scheduled for November 6–7, 2025, wherever thought leaders and innovators volition convene nether the taxable “Survival of the Greenest: Reclaiming Africa’s Food Destiny.”
The summit, convened annually by Sterling Bank, has go 1 of Africa’s foremost platforms for driving sustainable cultivation argumentation and investment. ASA 2025 volition bring unneurotic policymakers, financiers, agribusiness leaders, and farmers to co-create applicable solutions for achieving a resilient, food-secure continent.
“World Food Day and ASA 2025 are connected by a azygous truth,” Obikanye concluded. “Africa’s nutrient aboriginal volition beryllium secured lone erstwhile we harvester innovation, capital, and compassion to physique systems that provender our radical and support our planet.”
Through its H.E.A.R.T. strategy, focusing connected Health, Education, Agriculture, Renewable Energy, and Transportation, Sterling Bank continues to thrust investments that beforehand sustainable development, inclusive growth, and shared prosperity crossed Africa.
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