Kanayo F Nwanze: Ending isolation is a road to easing hunger in Africa

Recently, I was on a road in the Southern Choma District of Zambia to meet with Rosemary Pisani, a smallholder farmer and mother of eight who struggled to feed her children prior to joining a farmer's co-operative to raise goats. Thanks to support from other farmers, she now has a thriving business and all of her children are in school.

Often in Africa, the few paved roads that do exist are littered with potholes and lead to unpaved ones that are nearly impossible to navigate without a proper vehicle. Closer to farming communities, roads disappear entirely. This leaves rural areas, which have the potential to feed the more than one billion people, cut off and isolated. In sub-Saharan Africa, almost 70 per cent of all people living in rural areas are more than a 30-minute walk from the nearest maintained road.

Kofi Annan, chairman of the Board of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), has acknowledged this isolation: "The average African smallholding farmer swims alone. She has no insurance against erratic weather patterns, gets no subsidies, and has no access to credit. I say 'she' because the majority of small-scale farmers in Africa are women."

Indeed, half of the world's smallholders are women, and we must keep in mind their punishing task of walking long lengths to get their produce to market.

At the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), we believe that farming, regardless of size or scale, must be seen as a business, and smallholder farmers as small-scale business owners rather than poor people who need handouts.

The Green Revolution of the last century had a tremendous impact on agricultural yields and food production, transforming the lives of millions of people. Much of this success stemmed from infrastructure that was already in place.

New roads bring other essential services to rural communities. In Ethiopia, only 2 per cent of rural people have access to electricity, and telephone communication is more or less absent. Researchers believe that this is because only 17 per cent of rural communities in the country live within one mile of a paved road.

Together with poor infrastructure, many small farmers in Africa have insufficient access to productive assets, such as land, water, and new technologies. As a result, yields are generally too low to allow the millions of rural households to generate marketable surpluses.

That tap must be turned back on. In IFAD's experience, working simply to double the income of a smallholder farmer who scrapes by on less than a dollar a day is poverty management, because at two dollars a day, he or she still remains poor.But supporting that smallholder in launching a farming business that could generate a five-fold increase in income amounts to poverty eradication.

If smallholder farmers have the basic infrastructure they need to get their goods to market, they will not only be able to feed themselves and their communities, but will contribute to wider food security.

We just need to put the pavement down so that farmers like those I saw in Zambia can more easily make their way on the road to food security.

• Kanayo F Nwanze is president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.