The recent donation of US $500,000 by the President of African Development Bank (AfDB),
Adesina emerged the 2019 Sunhak Peace Prize Laureate alongside Waris Dirie, a global champion against Female Genital Mutilation, at a ceremony held in Seoul, South Korea last week. Adesina, who shared the prestigious US $1million prize with Dirie, said he is donating his $500,000 share of
He pledged to do more to advance Africa’s fight against hunger, poverty and youth underemployment. “We are in a race with time to unlock the full potential of Africa. My life is only useful to the extent that it helps to lift millions of people out of poverty. There is tremendous suffering going on in the world. While progress is being made, we are not winning the war on global hunger. “There cannot be peace in a world that is hungry.
Hunger persists in regions and places going through conflicts, wars and fragility. Those who suffer the most are women and children,” Adesina said during the award ceremony.
According to a recent report by the Global Hunger Index (GHI), global hunger has fallen more than a quarter since 2000, but conflict and climate shocks are beginning to reverse these gains. Nigeria has a serious hunger problem and ranks 84th out of 119 countries on the global hunger index – behind Togo, Kenya, Cameroon and Senegal.
The GHI scores of two famine-threatened countries, Nigeria and Yemen, fall in the serious and alarming categories, respectively. They do not fall into the extremely alarming category for two key reasons: inequality and timing.
Inequality plays a greater role in Nigeria, where 4.5 million people (out of a total population of roughly 180 million) in the Northeast of the country are experiencing or are at risk of famine, mainly due to ongoing violence spread by Boko Haram.
The report said the remainder of the country faces minimal food security concerns and uneven levels of child undernutrition. Nearly half of the 119 countries surveyed had “serious”, “alarming” or “extremely alarming” hunger levels between 2012 and 2016, with wartorn Central African Republic worst affected, followed by Chad, Sierra Leone, Madagascar and Zambia.
This scary statistics underscores the significance of Adesina’s $500,000 intervention in the efforts to reduce hunger and ameliorate its effect in Africa, especially his home country of Nigeria. In fact, Adesina’s antecedents portray a personality cut out to not only fight hunger but ensure food security for Nigeria in particular and Africa as a whole.
Adesina was born in Abeokuta, Ogun state on February 6, 1960, and had early roots in the agricultural sector as his father was a farmer. He read agricultural economics at undergraduate level at the Obafemi Awolowo University. He went further to undertake his postgraduate studies at Purdue University where he obtained a PhD in agricultural economics in 1988.
His work career began at the West African Rice Development Association (WARDA) in the Ivory Coast, where he worked for six years as a senior economist. In addition, courtesy of winning a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1988, he also worked as a senior economist with the Foundation until 1998 when he was appointed as the representative of the foundation for the southern African area.
He held this position until he was promoted to an associate director for food security in 2003. Until his appointment as minister in 2010, he was Vice President of Policy and Partnerships for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). In 2010, under the Goodluck Jonathan administration, he was appointed the Minister of Agriculture.
He held this post until the exit of the administration in 2015. His efforts were also recognised on a global scale as he was appointed as one of 17 global leaders to spearhead the Millennium Development Goals by the United Nations SecretaryGeneral. Adesina was elected the President of the African Development Bank on May 28, 2015, and has continued influencing Nigerian economy, especially during the economic recession.
He launched a strategy based on energy, agriculture, industrialisation, regional integration and bettering Africans’ lives, a move approved by the board of directors.box. Adesina, as expected, has earned several awards, some of which include the 2017 World Food Prize, 2015 Extraordinary Achievement Award by Silverbird Television, 2013 Forbes African Person of the Year and the 2007 YARA Prize for the African Green Revolution in Oslo.
It is expedient to call on Nigerian leaders, especially at this time when the four-year-cycle of the general elections is holding across the country, to emulate Adesina’s nationalism cum pan-African fervour.
Although eliminating hunger in Africa by 2030 will prove impossible without substantial reforms, individual and institutional commitment to fighting the scourge of hunger will, to a large extent, ameliorate its deleterious effects on the people.
