Five years ago, Cameroon made a promise on paper. Today, it is delivering on the ground and the world is taking notes. From strategy to delivery, Cameroon demonstrates how leadership, financing and coordination can drive food systems transformation at scale.
When Cameroon endorsed its National Food Systems Transition Roadmap in 2021, it joined dozens of countries that emerged from the UN Food Systems Summit with ambitious plans and little certainty about what came next. What sets Cameroon apart is not the ambition of its roadmap. It is what happened after.
In the years since, Cameroon has done something that many development frameworks struggle to achieve: it has translated political commitment into working institutions, working institutions into coordinated programmes, and coordinated programmes into real investment. The result is a model that is already attracting the attention and the financing of global partners.
Grace Mbong, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, was appointed as National Convenor for Food Systems Transformation, with a mandate to bring ministries to the same table and keep them there.
Her words capture the spirit of the effort: "Many hands can move a mountain."
Under her coordination, food systems focal points were established across five ministries, and an inter-ministerial governance platform created the infrastructure for genuine cross-government follow-through. Crucially, food systems priorities were embedded directly into Cameroon's National Development Strategy (SND30), raising their political profile all the way to the Prime Minister's Office.
This was not box-ticking. It was architecture, and the kind that makes everything else possible.
Climate, Food and Nature as One Agenda
For too long, food security, climate action and biodiversity have been treated as separate policy lanes, each with their own silos, summits and funding streams. Cameroon decided to merge the lanes.
Working with the UN Food Systems Coordination Hub, FAO, WFP, IFAD, GIZ and the UN Resident Coordinator Office, and backed by the Government of the Netherlands, Cameroon launched a Convergence Initiative bringing food systems, climate, biodiversity and nutrition into a single national framework. The result was the Food Systems Climate Action Convergence Action Blueprint, a shared document that defines three national priorities driving public investment from 2026 onward: rice value chain development, agro-ecological production of staples and livestock, and national self-sufficiency.
Science, Youth and Communities
Good governance and strategic alignment are necessary. They are not sufficient. What Cameroon has also built is a feedback loop between policy and reality, through the Science-Policy-Society Interface (SPSI), launched in Yaoundé in early 2025 with German development cooperation support.
The SPSI connects researchers, policymakers and communities, ensuring that decisions about food systems are shaped by scientific evidence, local knowledge and lived experience. It is, in practice, a mechanism for catching policy assumptions before they fail in the field.
Youth are central to this architecture, not peripheral to it. Rita Bonwi Njabeh, an alumna of the UN Food Systems Hub's Youth Leadership Programme, is now embedded in the National Convenor's team at the Ministry of Agriculture, contributing to national consultations, technical inputs to the Convergence Action Blueprint, and the establishment of the World Food Forum Cameroon National Chapter, a network of over 100 young professionals and students engaged in food systems transformation across the country.
This is youth engagement shifting from participation to practical delivery. The distinction matters.
From Planning to Programmes, CONVERGEFOOD
In March 2026, Cameroon crossed a critical threshold from planning to implementation with the launch of the CONVERGEFOOD Joint Programme under the Joint SDG Fund's Food Systems Transformation Window.
Delivered by WFP, FAO, UNEP, UNIDO and UNCDF, and supported by Germany, Ireland, Italy and Spain, CONVERGEFOOD targets the structural barriers that keep smallholder farmers trapped in low productivity and thin margins: food insecurity, limited market access, post-harvest losses, and restricted access to financing. It does so while keeping one eye firmly on the bigger picture, aligning these field-level interventions with Cameroon's national food and climate priorities.
The Scalable Success Model, funded by the European Union and implemented by WFP and FAO, works alongside CONVERGEFOOD, identifying solutions that work at the community level and building the evidence base to scale them. A completed needs assessment and stakeholder mapping have already sharpened the picture of where the real bottlenecks lie and where targeted support can break them.
The Financing Breakthrough, Seed Capital, Scaled Up
Perhaps the most striking chapter of Cameroon's story is the financing one.
The Joint SDG Fund provided US $2 million in seed funding, catalytic capital designed not to solve the problem, but to demonstrate that the problem is solvable and that the institutional architecture to address it is credible. It worked. At the UN Food Systems Summit +4 Stocktake in July 2025, the Government of Cameroon and the UN Resident Coordinator made an investment pitch that unlocked a further US $15 million from the Global Flagship Initiative for Food Security, to be delivered through the Islamic Development Bank via a blend of concessional and commercial financing.
The scale-up is significant. Where the initial programme worked with 44 cooperatives, the expanded effort could reach an additional 380. More importantly, the model of de-risking private sector investment in food value chains through innovative financing mechanisms is already being explored for replication across the Horn of Africa.
This is what catalytic capital is supposed to do. Cameroon has shown it can.
What This Means Beyond Cameroon
Cameroon's experience is not a success story to be admired and filed away. It is a reference model for governments working to move from national pathway to national delivery, for donors looking to maximize the impact of catalytic investment, and for the UN system navigating the challenge of genuine coherence in complex country contexts.
The lessons are transferable: empower a credible national convening mechanism, converge agendas early, connect evidence to policy, use catalytic funding to unlock larger financing, and bring youth into delivery and not just dialogue.
The mountain does not move by itself. But as Cameroon is proving, many hands aligned around a shared agenda, supported by the right tools and backed by genuine political will, can move it.
This article draws from the UN Food Systems Coordination Hub's article, Cameroon’s food systems transformation: From national pathway to delivering real change at scale (2021–2026).
Note:
All joint programmes of the Joint SDG Fund are led by UN Resident Coordinators and implemented by the agencies, funds, and programmes of the United Nations development system. With sincere appreciation for the contributions from the European Union and Governments of Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Republic of Korea, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland for a transformative movement towards achieving the SDGs by 2030.
