“You can’t build a peaceful world on an empty stomach,” Secretary of State John Kerry said yesterday at a high-level working session on resilience and food security, quoting Norman Borlaug, the father of last century’s “Green Revolution.”

One central message that emerged from the event, held at the national Academy of Sciences as part of this week’s ongoing U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, is that food security – for Africa or the world – won’t be achieved through agricultural productivity and other supply-side gains alone.

“Climate change, food security, and resilience are interrelated challenges that we all need to be thinking about as we plan for the future,” said Kerry. This message was echoed by White House Counselor John Podesta, who remarked that we will be “more successful at promoting resilience and food security; developing modern agriculture systems and practices; and building stronger economies and addressing the causes and impacts of climate change, if we approach these issues in a holistic way as opposed to tackling each challenge separately.”

So how do governments, NGOs, and other decision-makers capitalize on opportunities for integration? The working session pointed to three key ways forward: partnerships; addressing population and gender dynamics, including women’s and youth empowerment; and building resilience now as a basis for stability and economic growth in the future.

Partnership Is Key

A dizzying but encouraging array of new partnerships were announced.

His Excellency Hailemariam Desalegn, prime minister of Ethiopia, discussed his country’s new commitments under the Malabo Declaration, signed earlier this summer during an African Union assembly. The declaration is meant to deal with climate, food, and development challenges together, reaffirming African governments’ commitments to devote 10 percent of their national budgets to agricultural development and adding targets on doubling agricultural productivity, halving post-harvest loss, and reducing stunting 10 percent by 2025. Ethiopia has been a model for both rapid reductions in child death and parallel increases in agricultural productivity and appears well positioned to meet its obligations under the declaration.

Kerry announced that the United States will be signing onto the Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture and encouraged African leaders to do the same. To be launched on September 23, the alliance is expected to engage a range of government, multinational, private sector, farmer, and civil society stakeholders with the aim of achieving sustainable increases in agricultural productivity, greater climate resilience, and reductions in agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions.

The second lady, Dr. Jill Biden, announced that through the U.S. government’s Feed the Future initiative, more than 1,300 fellowships and long-term training opportunities will be offered to train the next generation of agriculture professionals, especially women, with a focus on contributing to climate-smart agriculture and reducing hunger, poverty, and undernutrition.

Several ongoing partnerships were also highlighted. The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, which the United States contributes to through Feed the Future, released its second report on progress towards the goal of raising 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years through sustained and inclusive agricultural growth.

Sipho Moyo, executive director of ONE Africa, highlighted civil society’s efforts with policy champions, selling agriculture to the general populace through pop culture and keeping governments accountable for promises made.

U.S. Representative Betty McCollum noted that partnership is key for foreign policy too and that Feed the Future should be considered one of the U.S. government’s top foreign policy tools. Besides directing public aid, it provides a vehicle for U.S. businesses to partner with Africa, she said, a notion supported by Dupont Executive Vice President James C. Borel who called on Congress to codify Feed the Future into legislation and noted the importance of a virtuous cycle of local engagement with environmental and economic solutions.

Such public-private partnerships are needed in areas like the Sahel, where the need for food security is dire. His Excellency Macky Sall, president of Senegal, noted that they and their neighbors are dealing with unpredictable cycles of drought and flooding and that efforts to reach traditional farmers – whether private or public – are incredibly important in order to reduce vulnerability and build resilience.

Empowering Women and Youth Can Build Resilience

A second important theme was population and gender dynamics. “The population of Earth is expected to grow and it’s expected to grow quickly,” said Kerry:

The 7 billion people that we’re focused on feeding today is going to become more than 9 billion people by 2050 – 35 years. And more than half of this population growth…is expected to occur in Africa. But on top of that, the growing impacts of climate change are going to put extraordinary stress on our ability to be able to produce the amount of food that we need to be able to feed those increasing numbers.

Meeting the needs of women and youth, the segments of society that most affect that trajectory of population growth, are therefore critical.

As USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah noted in introducing Chairperson of the African Union Nkosazana Clarice Zuma, it’s women who power the farms and create a pathway out of poverty.

Zuma noted wryly that “if African women were paid for their hard work in Africa they would be billionaires.” Women farmers want access to modern implements (they want to “see the hand held hoe put in a museum”), as well as better land and more capital. She said she and others pushed for inclusion of a clause in the Malabo Declaration guaranteeing African banks will allocate at least 30 percent of their agricultural lending to women, but they couldn’t get enough support other than a general commitment to “ensuring participation.”

It’s important to attract young people to agriculture too, particularly climate-smart agriculture, said Zuma. Job creation is an important challenge for many African countries looking to benefit from the demographic dividend – a boost in economic productivity that can occur as population growth slows and the working-age population swells – and climate-smart agriculture could be a pathway to a decent living for many young people. (We also know that access to reproductive health services and family planning – which are too often denied to women and young people – are cornerstones to building resilience to climate change and prerequisites to any demographic dividend.)

Disrupting the Cycle of Chronic Disasters

Improving farmers’ resilience to disruptions – including women, who are often especially vulnerable – is another needed step. Year after year, humanitarian aid is directed to the same regions, said Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation. “So much investment in development is weakened or wiped out by shocks and stressors – natural and man-made.”

Speaking about the broader importance of reducing vulnerability to famine and other chronic disasters, Rodin announced a new $100 million Global Resilience Partnership in collaboration with USAID. This partnership will focus on using predictive analytical tools, such as crisis mapping, and developing new streams of flexible financing, such as resilience impact bonds for new types of risk insurance, to catalyze innovation, find what works, and bring it to more places.

“Building resilience reduces the likelihood that severe disruption becomes disaster,” Rodin said, creating a “resilience dividend” that can help mitigate disasters and provide co-benefits, such as gains in economic productivity, that are valuable in both the humanitarian and development contexts.

Collaboration a Necessity?

On a continent where the majority of the population is still reliant on subsistence rain-fed agriculture, where climate change is already causing disruptions, and where population growth is the most rapid, it’s clear a comprehensive approach to development and resilience is necessary.

As noted by Monde Muyangwa yesterday, the first-ever U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit is a time to capitalize on opportunities for partnership. The session highlighted those opportunities for building on Africa’s potential for youth and women and increasing stability and economic production through the framework of resilience. Considering the challenges the continent faces, partnerships may not be just a good idea, but a fundamental requirement for success.